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DeeReader's avatar

Congrats on 100 and thank you for sharing your writing. I still remember that step rachet explanation in another one of your articles it was so helpful - I need to read again. Good luck out there everyone.

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Famous's avatar

Trump has pulled out of the unenforceable Paris climate accord, who's 1.5 C goal post we have already blown past? Oh no whatever shall we do?

There's more than one flavor of climate change denier. The MAGA-Tards are the kind that taste like shit and make me want to puke. Then there's the techno delusional and their peer delusionalist the COP & international agreement deniers. Then there are loads of people who are just not looking because they feel helpless and just keep fulfilling their roles as parent, worker, etc.

I'm not a skilled writer, nor do I have a good teacher's gentle touch, so I'm sharing something from Paul Chefurka who is both.

***Climbing The Ladder of Awareness***

When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages:

1 - Dead asleep. At this stage there seem to be no fundamental problems, just some shortcomings in human organization, behaviour and morality that can be fixed with the proper attention to rule-making. People at this stage tend to live their lives happily, with occasional outbursts of annoyance around election times or the quarterly corporate earnings seasons.

2 - Awareness of one fundamental problem. Whether it's Climate Change, overpopulation, Peak Oil, chemical pollution, oceanic over-fishing, biodiversity loss, corporatism, economic instability or sociopolitical injustice, one problem seems to engage the attention completely. People at this stage tend to become ardent activists for their chosen cause. They tend to be very vocal about their personal issue, and blind to any others.

3 - Awareness of many problems. As people let in more evidence from different domains, the awareness of complexity begins to grow. At this point a person worries about the prioritization of problems in terms of their immediacy and degree of impact. People at this stage may become reluctant to acknowledge new problems - for example, someone who is committed to fighting for social justice and against climate change may not recognize the problem of resource depletion. They may feel that the problem space is already complex enough, and the addition of any new concerns will only dilute the effort that needs to be focused on solving the "highest priority" problem.

4 - Awareness of the interconnections between the many problems. The realization that a solution in one domain may worsen a problem in another marks the beginning of large-scale system-level thinking. It also marks the transition from thinking of the situation in terms of a set of problems to thinking of it in terms of a predicament. At this point the possibility that there may not be a solution begins to raise its head.

People who arrive at this stage tend to withdraw into tight circles of like-minded individuals in order to trade insights and deepen their understanding of what's going on. These circles are necessarily small, both because personal dialogue is essential for this depth of exploration, and because there just aren't very many people who have arrived at this level of understanding.

5 - Awareness that the predicament encompasses all aspects of life. This includes everything we do, how we do it, our relationships with each other, as well as our treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the physical planet. With this realization, the floodgates open, and no problem is exempt from consideration or acceptance. The very concept of a "Solution" is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.

For those who arrive at Stage 5 there is a real risk that depression will set in. After all, we've learned throughout our lives that our hope for tomorrow lies in our ability to solve problems today. When no amount of human cleverness appears able to solve our predicament the possibility of hope can vanish like a the light of a candle flame, to be replaced by the suffocating darkness of despair.

http://paulchefurka.ca/LadderOfAwareness.html

~~

The MAGA-Deniers do not matter, nor do any of the COP's or Paris accord, nor another 9,000,000 warnings from individual scientists or the scientific community. Humans are in the predicaments they are in due to their behaviour, which they are not the authors of. We did not create ourselves.

I hate those MAGA fuck tards as much as anyone, if not the most and I am no fan of western left winger self proclaimed saviors come to fix all social ills - they know best. I hate all those right-wing denier scum no matter what nation they are from, but they can no more help their denial than I can help my hate and my schadenfreude watching them burn and drown and such.

We were headed here all along. Once humans evolved full behavioural modernity it was just a matter of time before they unlocked the power of fossil fuels and birthed industrial civilization. Sure the timing could have been different, sooner or later, but the humans are far too clever not to have exploited fossil fuel's full power. I know all about big oil's yearly billion dollar denial campaign budget and I think it's 1 of the biggest waste of money in history. It's tied with the collective environmental NGO's yearly 'fight climate' multi-billion dollar bull shit budget.

With a couple minor exceptions fossil fuel use has gone up every year since James Hansen addressed the US senate and the world with the first serious no doubt climte change warning.

If all the people who claim to view climate change as a serious threat were to reduce their energy use and consumption by a modest 20%, don't you think that it would show up in the economic and energy consumption data? Truth - how many people have given up the goodies for real? I have, but it was as much about me checking out of society as much as I could without becoming homeless. I know it's a bit of a contradiction for me on the one hand say humans are not responsible for the predicaments they are in, while on the other hand hating the fuck out of right-wing, mostly N American, climate change deniers, but I am only human after all.

~

***The purpose of life is to disperse energy***

The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species.

The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy.

Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations.

There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs.

Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations.

MORE

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674

~~~~~

You & Me and the MPP

I do appreciate all the time and effort you put in to creating The Crisis Reports.

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