Watching the world go by is a fascinating study in human kind. I’m undoubtedly spending more time than is healthy watching world politics, and thinking, “but it’s like a car crash - you can’t look away” - actually…I can look away from car crashes (and recommend you do - you can’t unsee things), but the state of present human interaction is even more dreadfully compelling.
I’ve started a new weekly-ish serial (that’s a link) around the global mess. It’s less fun than the health knight thing, cus I can skew closer to serious when not worried about dying. It’s still not too serious, cus it’s worry about the species dying. We shouldn’t die off until after I do, however, so it’s not as immediate. It’s several episodes in already.
As with most of my writing, it’s mostly an attempt to impress myself with my wit (I’m a pretty easy critic on my own stuff)…it probably would be considered a bit blasphemous by some, but I find the people that would find it blasphemous are often expressing things I find blasphemous - they just have a religion with a more recognizable brand, and more than just themselves as believers. My God can take a joke.
Continuing the Blasphemy, I have the first short story I’ve written in ages up already. I wrote it while processing my Dad’s death, and I just ran across it when looking for the previously completed ‘seed’ to the coming serial. I think it’s worthy of release (but I’m a pretty easy critic…). I was trying to put a happier spin on death and an ‘after’ (that’s a link) that would have it all make more sense.
In that somber vein, a great guy I first met in University at Queens just passed on, and will be missed. Life gets even better in {insert the name of the afterlife of your choice} Or I think it does…I hope it does - I don’t pray much, but it might be time to start - with a prayer it does. I hope to see ya there in due time, Cambo.
Out in the big bad world…I mean that orange dude is just getting more and more surreal. One of my breakfast friends turns to me every couple days and says, “Can you believe people can listen to…that - and still support it.” and I say, “Most people are busy, and don’t pay much attention.” and he says, “But they can’t be so stupid that they can hear him speak out loud, even once, and not notice what a complete idiot he is” and I say, “They do, and they don’t, respectively’ and he holds back tears and turns to the woman seated on his other side, repeats the question and they have a good vent for awhile. It’s about once every two days, this little ritual, and it’s been going on for months.
On the off days, we have a different ritual. The same guy says, “How can people follow a political party or worse, be an elected member of that party, and think his leadership is a good thing.” and I answer, “Mostly tribalism, in it’s more racist expression, and fear of sticking your neck out, respectively.” and he says, “but…” and I wait, as he holds back tears, turns to the woman seated on his other side, repeats the question, and they have a good vent for awhile.
I’m beginning to think that he does’t want an answer, he just wants a good vent. Hmm. If that’s a human foible, it makes so many interpersonal interactions in my life make so much more sense…People are looking to have a vent, not understand the problem…Oh my. Sorry to every ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had - I get it now! Why do you start the vent with a question, then?
Anyway, it’s a new rule I’ll try to hold to. If someone asks a emotionally loaded question with a fairly obvious answer, they probably just want to vent. Thinking about it, most people seem to have made that rule for themselves a lot sooner in their lives. Another example of my ability to be a slow learner, sometimes - like I needed another example.
That afore mentioned friend is retired, so has enough time on his hands to pay attention and is smart enough to understand how dangerous this fashionable, globally vibrant expression of tribalism is for our world. He might want to be living on a different world, just now. I know I kinda do. I have pointed out to him how the end of the world is such an exciting time to be alive! His answer was, “I’d be happy with boredom, thanks”, and left to catch his tee time.
I’m beginning to approach the point of this blog, so stay with me - I’m taking even longer than usual with this, sorry. Its about this world we do live in…on a topic I’ve recorded some of my thinking about on this blog, elsewhere, and there is probably related stuff in my head that’s got tangled up inside and not made it out yet, but it’s about trying to see a path to an ‘un-bad’, hundred year-ish future for the world. My predictions get hooked on a few key components. Some of this is obvious but I’m putting it down in the interest of completeness, and because I forget pretty obvious things sometimes.
Life is really, really complex…at least in terms of the human capacity to understand. It’s probably complex in a much smarter, wiser being’s capacity to understand, as well, but I certainly can’t speak to that, being human and all…
Complexity has patterns. Some of those patterns are random noise and others represent recurring themes that we could use to inform models to predict future events. Patterns that have plausible mechanisms of action are more likely to be useful that way, than patterns that just happen repeatedly for no obvious reason. Random has patterns sometimes, or it wouldn’t be random.
Those recurring patterns are based on gazilions of variables, but sometimes, only a few of those variables matter. My rule of thumb is five variables, but pretty often some of the five are just hanging out, and not really contributing. If it’s just snowed in Calgary (this example comes to mind for no particular reason), and you trod through ten cm of snow wearing loafers and no socks, by the time you get to the breakfast cafe, your feet are cold. This is totally predictable, and holds true in every study I’ve made. The only variables that really matter are; a 30 m walk outside, snow higher than the top of the loafer, and no socks. We can make reliable predictions here on just three variables. You could add variables like getting hit by a car during the crossing of the street, but those variables are low enough likelihood (that never happens) or severity (the example is pretty severe, mind) to discount for practical reasons - the cold feet would still happen when you were writhing on the ground, please note - it just isn’t your most pressing problem in the event. Or something you had any future recollection of in the event...If cold feet happen in a forest of ICU equipment, does anyone shiver? Whatevs.
Making predictions is kinda the point of science. If you build a house (or a car, or a computer) out of a particular material, in a particular way, you can do a bunch of math and predict if it will function in it’s desired capacity or not. Predictions are good ways to focus your efforts on any given day. The kinds of predictions that rely on static rules and math are way more reliable than the ones about human systems, by the way - even if you use math (silly economists). You’re still better off to make predictions extrapolating from previous experience and plausible reactions of people to changing circumstance than just relying on pure whimsy, mind. Whimsy is fun, but not great on making predictions that are likely to pan out (see Steven Moore) - if a whimsy-ed prediction turns out right, you probably weren’t really whimsy-ing. Again, it’s happened in every study I’ve made, so is predictable! I’ve had a good bit of fun doing it, but lost a ton of cash - if not quite as much as I’ve made with better supported predictions that worked out.
There are really a lot of other components active in the world of today, but they don’t really matter very much on the topic of this blog. The topic I still haven’t got around to introducing - stay with me here. We’re almost there.
I find it’s easier to just consider a few components at a time when thinking, cus it makes your head hurt less. It’s happened in every study I’ve made, so is predictable! See how this works! I love science…anyway, lets see if we can track down some variables that dominate broad social behaviour in the world today, based on the math-y kind of prediction, examples in history, and the psychology of our species.
Global Climate Change - It’s happening, it’s anthropogenic, and is a math-y kind of prediction and is real. if you want to get dispute that, get in touch with me and we can go on and on for days and weeks and months, but I’m not doing that in this post. You’re welcome. If you get all worked up about that debate, in a direction broadly unconcerned about it, continue only if you want to get worked up.
Lots of billions of people are living at the edge of our present technologies ability to feed and clothe them within existing logistics capacity - a bit of a big label to stick on a variable, so lets call it a combination of three kinetically active variables and we get to my five variable rule of thumb! Call those three kinetically active variables whatever you’d like, but I’m going to call the collection Bob.
Mass migration - Really a prediction based on the existence and magnitude of variable one and variable Bob, but I’m going to call a variable in it’s own right cus it introduces a bunch of new behaviour. Yes, that means feedback from it plugs back into itself, but that’s kinda how it works.
Ignoring all the other variables in existence as not that big a deal, we get…four, divided by twenty eight, minus the square root of pi divided by the volume of an apple pie, equals…War! Really lots of war. Anybody watching as the world order pulls apart trying to deal with a few million migrants from places that have become nasty, and not seeing how this plays out, needs to read a bit of history - really any random bit of history. It’s all over the place in history. At the least, those ‘anybodies’ should look into what is causing those, previously mentioned, ‘nasty places’ to become ‘nasty’ at the present time. ‘Anybody’ should see the effect pretty clearly then.
That ‘nasty places’ thing is heading orders of magnitude higher in number soon, and bigger in size, because of variables one and two (Bob) and their feedback through variable three. It’s one of those self fueling cycles - one that ends naturally when so many people are dead, that further death doesn’t make any decision maker (made up of those rich, or powerful enough to have a say) think their ‘prediction of future benefit’, is likely to improve with more death (that rich/powerful persons prediction may be a really weird whimsy-ish thing, cus the rich and powerful are often a bit eccentric - see ‘history, a lot of places (again)’).
So that, there, is one a sucky prediction - in the sense that the outcome sucks, not in the sense that the prediction is inaccurate. The prediction is almost certainly inevitable…damn it, although ‘soon’ is a pretty wide time window.
At long last, I get to the sort of point of writing this. What can we do to try and make this predication thing move into a different end point? What variable (including the ones that aren’t big enough to matter at the moment, so weren’t included in the prediction [or were hidden in Bob], but that could be encouraged to become large enough to matter - with some effort) could we change enough?
These are all global political and social forces, and we’re just individual little cells that might pay a little bit of attention, and are somewhat concerned (or on the edge of panic, whatevs) but can’t move the human organism anywhere, by ourselves. We need to find variables that we can do something about, and start there. If we tear apart variable one, we might find a variable hidden in there that we can pull on, cus Bob (variable two) and three are people problems all the way through, so solving them is really difficult - there seems to be a lot of inevitable about them, cus ‘people’.
Information about the urgency is good. If we got more people paying attention to the problem and realising how close to a nasty edge we are, we might be able to, collectively, move the human organism somewhere, and slow down the Climate Change thing. Of course, if large groups of people that pay a little bit of attention, and a few people that pay a lot of attention, weren’t trying to flog false information around this crisis, it would be a lot easier.
Those ‘false information’ people will burn or freeze or whatever, (in a post death underworld of your choice), but by then we’re kind of dying in huge quantities - and the afterlife better be able to scale up operations faster than American border officials, or Brexit organisers. Maybe they’ll be able to deal with it cus ‘afterlife’. The afterlife might have a worker class quicker to adjust than humans, and a management class quicker to plan for predictable change, so they are already staffing up and training big time.
We (the species) have broken through nature’s typical population limiting arsenal on food production (with better fertilizers), disease (primarily with clean water, and antibiotics), and limited habitat (with heating and air-conditioning amongst other stuff). Each step forward with technology in those areas has let us expand the sustainable population of people - sometimes with growth taking a few centuries off, and life being all unpleasant in the meantime (…nasty, brutish and short - Thomas Hobbes, on peasant’s lives, and the middle ages), but the limitations to population growth eventually shift outward. So all we need is continuing progress with science and we’ll get through this (soon to be population compressing) Climate Change limitation on habitat growth, and we’ll be good! Yeah Science!
Can we get to a place that the present ‘western’ energy consumption rates can be supported sustainably for the global predicted populations over the next hundred years or so? It’s an easy yes. Absolutely. Take the solar energy that hits the Sierra Desert, and collect it at ten percent efficiency, and you’ve got way more energy than we can use until there are orders of magnitudes more of us. We can collect solar at way better than ten percent, by the way. There might not be enough of the key materials to cover that much area with solar panels, but us scientists guys include some way smarter than me, so they can probably sort it out - and that will be lots of energy even after we develop replicators and transporter beams.
So we can do this, and just need some time to sort out how. I mean, whats the rush? It turns out CO2 takes a long-ish time (in terms of human generations) to get back down to pre-industrial levels if we stop emitting (not slow down - Stop), leading to a bit of a rush. While we are sorting out the problem, and cooperating so amazingly well at paving the worlds deserts with solar panels, we are kicking out more and more CO2 (we’ll ignore the other stuff for now. Pretend we’ve got all under control). It takes a bit of time for the world of today to come to equilibrium with the amount of CO2 in the air now, so, in particular, the chemical effect on the ocean isn’t at steady state yet. It won’t be for a while cus it’s almost as big as the atmosphere, and takes a bit of time to stir.
The loss of coral reefs and change in the shellfish-ish things living conditions associated with ocean acidification is going to be (and already is) bad - really, really, really, really bad. That includes a lot of the major ocean ecological systems. It turns out that all those ocean critters that make their homes, or skeletons, or whatever out of carbonate minerals are running into an availability shortage for their desired building material. That is true, even if humans stopped having an increasing effect on the amount of CO2 released to atmosphere today. We aren’t stopping that positive effect, by the way. That acidification will still happen if all of mankind dies overnight and decompose without releasing any additional green house compounds (not that I recommend that as a mitigating measure, you understand).
So the Oceans have to sort out some new ecological balances, and those aquatic species will just have to power evolve a little. We’re just helping evolution along by changing conditions a bit! It’s no worse than a big asteroid strike, and biology got through that a few times already. The geologists assure me that the world has had higher CO2 levels before and life did ok, but the biologists assure me that none of the higher species alive today would survive in the (poisonous to us) atmosphere that existed at those times. Whatevs.
The global biosphere is always changing and evolving and will come to a new happy place even with our efforts, or lack of efforts (the biologist continue to inform me). It just might not be in a state humans can easily survive in. The various rich retired folks I regularly converse and play bridge with, at a private club I’m a member at, inform me that an asteroid strike, or the flipping of the magnetic poles, or the super-volcano at Yellowstone (that one’s been popular lately - did I miss a Discovery special?), or the shut down of the Atlantic conveyor, would have a greater effects, a lot faster, and those are all natural things we can’t control. They all might cause all sorts of problems to global populations of stuff, so why care about Climate Change?
I generally sigh, gather my strength and order another drink for both me and the prospective recipient of my disguised rage. I want them to sit still for a bit. The drink helps with that. So does disguising my rage. I then ask, quietly, if they regularly sleep in the middle of the road, cus they might get hit by a car one day (it happens), so why fight it? Struggling to maintain a calm visage and tone, I ask, quietly, “What the hell do possible horrible things, that might happen despite our efforts, have to do with us helping make horrible things happen for sure, right now?” In the space I leave for a response, I usually get something about the debate on the science.
I point out that there are fewer dissenters among the scientists that work in the field, than there are scientists in that same population that have been abducted by aliens and returned to earth (by there own accounts - and I haven’t actually taken a poll, but it should be close to true). There are fewer dissenters, by percentage, than people that think the world is flat (I’ve read that poll). There are a lot fewer dissenters than there are incompetent scientists, although the overlap is higher in that category.
I then ask, “Are two and a bit, four and a bit, and fifteen, in microns, are the wavelengths CO2 absorbs energy at?” They usually say something about not knowing the detail on the science. I then smile dangerously, shake my head mournfully, sit back in my chair, and say something like, “I do. Yes, the industry that made you rich (I’m in Calgary, so that’s inevitably oil) is presently making it less and less likely your grandchildren will have a pleasant life. It’s ok, you didn’t know at the time. You do now. Stop fighting it, and spend the time you have left making things better - as penance, if not payback. Don’t you love your grandkids?”
They usually get up and sit somewhere far away (carrying their drink) at that point, unless they are playing bridge against me, in which case they change the subject aggressively. They do tend to be careful not to bring it up when I’m around again, which helps control my blood pressure. I recommend that line of discussion with skeptics you might run into, unless it matters if they like you much. It’s harder with that ‘like’ constraint.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m writing this on a computer with a KW power supply, and using a 55 in, 4k screen. I don’t drive, live in a huge house or engage in a lot of energy intensive activities, but that is more about my health than my desire. I help clean up oil spills and stuff, but we often burn more hydrocarbons cleaning up the mess than is in the mess.
I haven’t contributed to our population increase, but again, that is less about desire than opportunity. Ah population. In the end, that is really the heart of the problem - a population of more than seven billion humans, not my lack of children (I expect the world is better off from the lack of my children thing, in more ways than reducing the net population a teeny bit).
It is approximately true that half the people that have ever lived are alive right now. Population in the areas of the world most likely to see the worst outcomes (with respect to people dying and stuff. Not the largest effect) have the fastest growing populations. It may become a self-correcting problem of a sort, but it’s a really horrible correction. I rationalise that it is a society level problem, so alone, I can’t help much, and just write blogs hoping to budge the Overton window and assuage my guilt. I mean, I don’t even work very hard to make those blogs readable, so I’m not providing Overton with much of a boost.
The global extinction event we are living through, even before we had enough population to profoundly effect global ecosystems, is not a good thing, and stains all our souls…if we have souls - it stains something else if we don’t. All those scientists going on about biodiversity being good are doing so for a reason. It is good. After extinction level events, there is always a giant explosion of evolution trying to fill empty environmental niches, so that’s cool, but the extinction event is a bit hard on the populations so extincting…
We get back to the theme of this blog again here. I do usually get back to my themes. I just don’t still have much of an audience left by the time I do. What can we do to make the world better? The biggest component of political change is generational change, because it is really hard to get people to change their minds about stuff they’ve already thought about. Once the ‘Greatest Generation’, who fought in WWII, died off, gays went from ‘not mentioned in good company’ to ‘married’.
If you’ve thought something through, and done all that hard work of thinking, the last thing you want to do is remove all that thinking, and stick in new ideas, that you have to think about all anew, back in. That sort of thing is a terribly inefficient use of time - provided you were close enough with the stuff you had already thought about. So you have to convince people they should rethink it, before you even open the door on acting on the rethought thought. It’s easier to wait for the generation to die off, than do all that convincing. We need to address this faster than generationally though - that taking a long time to equilibrate and come back down thing, and all that imminent war stuff. There will be a lot of generations that get to deal with the last couple generations problem, the slower we are.
We need to understand that there is no more urgent problem than Climate Change on the planet. That Climate Change is related to the surging population of people does link it to population, but it’s the Climate Change part that is urgent. If you can fix that in a way that doesn’t kill off a bunch of people, we’re good. Otherwise Climate Change and the break down in societies, will kill off a bunch of people and solve itself, in that way nature does things really, really ruthlessly. I mean, people are really adaptable, so it’s unlikely to kill us all off, and we’re all going to die eventually, so whatevs, right?
I mean, there are piles of other big problems we have to deal with including nuclear proliferation, terrorism, taxes, job losses and economic expansion, and…and…and. All those problems are made worse by unmitigated Climate Change, especially with that little ‘war’ thing, that ends up using nuclear weapons, which started because of border clashes, influenced by the availability of food and growing populations. I mean, really, those sorts of problems, and every other problem out there can wait a bit.
I guess you need to eat pretty often, so food access is a problem that isn’t going to wait till later. Same with clean water, and if you don’t have a job, buying food and water is a problem. Yes and yes. People are going to have to start working together much better, and sharing the wealth really generously to get though this next while without really huge bad things happening. Actually, really huge bad things are baked in the cake, who’s kidding.
Really, there is too much bad stuff baked in the cake, and we aren’t going to solve it in the relevant time scales through slowing emission rates, so we need a technological solution. The good ship ‘cutting emissions’, sailed while we were laughing at Al Gore - or maybe Jimmy Carter.
We need a really expensive technological solution that is going to require sharing the wealth a lot more. We need to have a global ‘Manhattan Project’ style effort to sort out really huge CO2 scrubbers that run off clean energy sources. (That would be working to ‘not kill’ lots of people instead of ‘killing really huge amounts really efficiently’, like the actual Manhattan Project did). We still need the zero emission energy sources, so that’s still there, mind. It’s just that by any reasonable estimate of when we’ll sort that out, it’s too late for just that to save civilization (and I’m not being melodramatic with that ‘save civilization’ there).
These scrubbers need to be either very distributed (like, say…cars) or really really really big cus the atmosphere is really huge and stuff. We need to be able to reverse climate change because we are not going to stop emitting in time. It’s where I get to, every time I think through this problem, which might mean it’s got characteristics in common with something correct - and it opens up really cool future applications in climate manipulation that we’ll probably screw up a few times before we get it right, but it’s at least cool! And there is an obvious military dimension to these huge scrubbers and global climate control, so even the people that only get excited when they are extorting from, and threatening and killing people should be excited about the opportunities!
[start heartfelt exhortation]
Please not the upper atmospheric spraying of SO2 and stuff, cus that’s way down the unintended consequences hole and screwing up the atmosphere would be bad. It is bad. Screwing it up in a whole new way while trying to fix the way we already screwed it up, in a way we understand even less well than the way we’ve already screwed it up, is likely to be worse than the screwing it up we presently doing, and trying to fix. Please not that.
[end heartfelt exhortation]
The thing that we can all do, is push political/social movements to get on this. Our quality of life measurements, measured as GDP growth, are going to take a hit whether we do this or not, but our quality of life measurements as ‘not being selfish shitheads’ will spike upwards if we fix things. It turns out that more shiny things don’t make people as happy as the ‘not being selfish shitheads’ stuff. Really. Trust me on that. It’s happened in every study I’ve made, so is predictable. Science again. (Sorry to the people I was a selfish shithead towards. It was in the name of science. Really).
There are going to be wide spread hot and cold wars, in increasing severity and size, the whole time we are figuring that tech stuff out. That leaves a pretty small contribution coming from warring countries. Good stable ‘not war’ societies are where the action on this needs to come from. Canada holds a pretty good spot for that ‘not war’ society. I hope the US does too, but I can’t really get myself to believe that.
Lets pay more taxes and invest really massively and probably inefficiently on this, and hell, some of us will be able to collect income streams out of saving the world and win all round! Job shortages aren’t a problem here, as we require a lot of man hours to figure this out. The economics are good for everyone, because the collapse of the world order is even more expensive (see history, any time the dominant empire collapses). Once it’s all solved there may be a jobs problem as things settle into a new equilibrium, but everything doesn’t get wrapped up in bows forever. The Yellowstone super volcano will probably take us all out by then anyway, so whatevs.
Anyone reading this, that has their own island or something, and can invite Trudeau the Younger over for a visit - get on him for this. He loves making international statements on topics like this. Something like “We’ve been too slow and lackadaisical about our response to this crisis, and we need to have another Paris Agreement that works out cash contributions for developing this equipment.”
No one will pay much attention, but if he keeps on it, he will move the Overton window a bit. If you can figure out a way to put TRUMP across the resulting equipment, and a way to siphon off a good part of the spend for his family, we might be able to make real progress here. We need to try. Screw getting back to the moon. That can wait - or it becomes necessary, if things go really badly…hmmm.
If the world wants to fall into fights against the ‘other’ lets make the ‘other’ Climate Change instead of people with funny accents, or different amounts of melanin. If we can only ever pull together to fight something, and pulling together to achieve something is a harder sell, it’s Climate Change that’s the big bad here. That’s the enemy. Fight the enemy!
We need to make this the defining political movement of our times. “Pay more taxes to fight the Climate” makes a - not very good chant. Need to work on that. “Spend wisely. Climate scrubbers!” - not any better. People with kids, get them on this. I was good at chants when I was a teenager. Or I’m mis-remembering teenage-hood…and what I was good at...Hmmm.
Wait…Kids! They have energy and like stirring up trouble. Let your young adult kids know that the anti-Iraq war protests in London didn’t do any good, but they were awesome places to pick-up, and the anti-Vietnam war protests a generation earlier, same thing! Except those ones might have even done some good! Get your kids protesting! It’s their children that are going to be totally cooked, so they should care more than we do. And remind them to use protection, cus it’s population growth underlying the problem…Oh noes…We might need a miracle…Sob…
P.S.
I try to put a positive spin on these things, and make a joke at the end, and that’s the best I can come up with…bummer