Coping with Global Climate Destabilization, personally

Three things are needed for a person to act:
1. The action has to be effective
2. The actor has to be capable of performing the action
3. The actor has to feel worthy of the consequences of acting

Let’s examine how human beings will have to differ, in order to adjust to be Planetary Managers.

The first step to taking charge of our own evolution is admitting that our current evolutionary design is not optimized to manage our entire planet. Accepting emotionally that, as we are, we’ve failed and will continue to fail to cope with the challenges of keeping Earth livable, leads to depression and inability to act. To admit design failure seems to be admitting failure as human beings. It seems to mean that we don’t deserve a habitable planet because we can’t take care of one (as we are now). In the language of Eric Berne’s Games People Play it seems to be taking the stance “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” which is self-destructive and can’t be maintained.

To understand why this isn’t so, let’s begin with Riane Eisler’s Cultural Transformation Theory. A competitive basis for self-esteem, as in “I’m OK, You’re not OK” or “You’re OK, I’m not OK” or “I’m not OK, You’re not OK” arises from Dominator Culture. Dominator Culture evolved out of our primitive brain hierarchical social instincts. The reptile brain conducts dominance and submission behaviors. Partnership Culture, on the other hand, seems to be based in maternal behavior of the lymbic system, seat of cooperation and nurturance. Only by realizing we’ve been living entirely subsumed by Dominator Culture and grasping the “I’m OK, You’re OK” of Partnership Culture can we build a global society that transcends the limitations of reptile brain socialization.

Once we embrace “I’m OK, You’re OK” emotionally, we’re in a position to ask, with our higher brain, whether the criteria against which we’ve declared ourselves unworthy aren’t impossible. Are we not facing a dilemma that all sentient species that conquer their planets must face? Let’s not compare ourselves presupposing Darwinian competition amidst unlimited natural resources, but compare ourselves in the challenge to transcend our native evolved limits. We have outgrown that Darwinian-instinct-based environment, where predators and temporary localized resource shortages are the main challenges. Now that we’ve conquered our planet, we ourselves are our own worst enemy. Our instincts to overproduce and consume are the real threats.

So let’s feel ourselves on the threshold of every sentient species first great challenge, not as unworthy but as ready to step up to our first self-controlled transformation. It’s time for Humanity 2.0. We need now to work together to find work arounds for each of the evolved limitations that hold us back. We do have tools. We are inventive. Let’s reinvent ourselves.

The human evolved design isn't up to planetary civilization.

Climate Denial Normalcy Bias is ignoring signs of danger, like a gazelle who keeps munching grass while lions lurk and storms skirt the horizon. It includes keeping the danger as background while focusing on your immediate interests. It includes checking to see if others are reacting, before you decide there's really danger. Like a herd of gazelles, we stay calm and deny danger until it's really threatening life and limb, and then we all get scared together. We evolved only to respond to short-acting danger, not to large scale slowly unfolding dangers of planetary scale. Our evolved responses don't work when the threshold for response occurs early and later, when the danger is severe, feedbacks make it out-of-control.

Flight or Fight When we finally get scared, we're hardwired for either flight (become a refugee) or fight (run out of water and kill each other for it), or sometimes freezing (Climate Destabilization isn't a predator so easily fooled). We'd have to take a hand in our own evolution to rewire a "plan and execute plan" response to fear and panic. The response that might work is just missing.
Jaron's Paradox Technological innovation can't save us, because every time we make a process more efficient human beings exploit it even more. We're like a gas that expands to fill every volume. We just improve our lifestyle and make more people.

Neural Architecture Triune brain anatomy: each of us has three parallel processors, a reptile brain, a lymbic system, and a higher brain. The two primitive brains have no language or symbolic thought, but they make decisions such as what's true, what's important, reproduction, and response to danger. Our higher brain can think in language and make plans, but has no emotion. We just aren't wired to emotionally respond to statistics and computer models. We respond to pain and puppies, sex and food. Reading about projected global climate destabilization feels dry and intellectual, distant. We get no gut reaction, unlike WWF.

Civilization is a Heat Engine Climate Destabilization is much larger than CO2 rise. The flow of energy defines civilization. Constructal Theory is beginning to quantify this flow. If we organized miraculously to eliminate fossil fuel use, we'd still keep heating up the Earth. We'd have "cooling towers" from nuclear power plants dumping their excess heat into the air, or the rivers. We'd send microwaves from space, but that would still pump excess energy into the air/water/soil of Earth. We just don't know how to run an economy that doesn't keep using more and more energy.

Selfish Institutions We're so easy to manipulate by spin doctors and the media, by our entertainment, our corporations, and our religions. Every institution of the modern globalized world puts its own prosperity and growth above the commons, the ultimate commons of a sustainable planet. Primarily governed by short term profits, our institutional structure is fundamentally incompatible with the long view. Each one promotes its own truth, i.e. the view that serves its myopic self interest.

What hope do I see? First we have to admit our design failure. Then we have to reinvent ourselves, as Steven Hawking says, control our own evolution. This doesn't have to involve human/machine integration or breeding experiments. It could mean co-evolving with our information systems, involving the entire population of the planet in education... personalized visualizations about the future we're building or not for their town and region ... and in working together to create a plan we can all live with.

Fourth Wave Civilization: Global Heat Engine

Definition: When the energy and matter streams of an entire planet are subsumed into a planetary civilization which, as a heat engine, destabilizes the planet’s ecosystem, and climate, making the planet uninhabitable. It’s like a primitive engine with no governor, which runs faster and faster until it explodes.


Alvin Toffler introduced us to the Information Age, Third Wave Civilization. We’ve since outgrown that before it consolidated. “History is a succession of rolling waves of change.” he said. Civilizations can coexist and interpenetrate.

Timothy Garrett of the University of Utah writes, “So, perhaps surprisingly, changes in population and standard of living might best be considered as only a response to energy efficiency. As part of a heat engine, creating people and their lifestyles requires energy consumption. Doing so efficiently merely serves to bootstrap civilization into a more consumptive (and productive) state by increasing the dimensions of the boundary separating civilization and its environment.” The Jevrons Paradox applies to civilization as a whole, gains in energy efficiency accelerate global energy consumption instead of slowing it.

Chris Hedges says, “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.”

From the perspective of Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory, in our globalized economy, all of the energy resources and material resources of the planet flow into one stream, corporate profit as measured by the stock market.

The obvious objection, that noneconomic institutions such as religions, journals, news media, and nonprofits compete with global profit flow, providing feedback, turns out to be superficial and misleading. In past civilizations when institutions serving noneconomic functions had independent structures, this was true. Today lines between entertainment, news, politics, business advertising, and religion are superficial. Religions and nonprofit entities thrive or disappear on quarterly returns, media cycles, and politics as much as banks.

While we’ve invented smart appliances, we haven’t invented smart institutions. Corporate entities know only how to survive short term. They’re memeplexes, despite the intelligence of human role players, institutionally no smarter than viruses. Our corporate entities can’t imagine self interest in stopping global climate destabilization. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. Their environment is a free commons to externalize costs and risks. If one nonprofit begins to assume costs which its competitors offload, it chokes off flows of money, goods, information, or people which kept it viable. No matter how noble the cause, if a nonprofit doesn’t raise funds, pay its bills, advertise, and attract new members, it quickly loses market share. As long as religions have an institutional incentive to overpopulate the planet, they will.

In sum, more efficient wind turbines won’t save humanity. We need to reinvent civilization at the roots, adding feedback loops to internalize Planetary costs to institutions which generate them.

Loss Aversion and Global Climate Destabilization

Behavioral Economist George Loewenstein describes loss aversion in Discover (Jan/Feb 2010, p 33): “In a lot of competitive situations, people look at others whom they perceive to be at a higher level, which forms their reference. They feel themselves to be in the domain of losses, and they are desperate to get out. Much cheating, it seems, occurs not because people just want more but because they feel ‘in a hole’ that they can get out of only by cheating.”

Here we are, plunging headlong into a “hole” so terrifying and permanent that to most people it’s literally unthinkable, destabilizing Earth, making our planet incapable of supporting civilization. Yet because our fear systems are “not very good at dealing with gradually unfolding threats”, as he says on page 32, our prospects are bleak.

Why aren’t we reframing Earth’s danger in terms of getting into a terrifying hole? Why can’t we present it in feelings a gambler or an underprivileged child understands?

This brought to mind the story of an African poacher, an ordinary nice guy trapped in self-perpetuating poverty. He felt his only option was to do illegal poaching, just this once, to get out of the hole.

Thing is, there’s no cheating Nature. This time self-perpetuation is the climate change mechanisms we start by default (do-nothing-different is the easy option) and we can’t ever stop. The default effect, he says, is that people tend to be lazy decision makers, taking the path of least resistance.


moar funny pictures

Hatreds conceal nieve hope

ALISSA J. RUBIN, a New York Times correspondent shared her lessons learned from the Iraq war, reminding me of the difficulties humanity face in coping with global climate destabilization.

“Americans wanted to believe that their version of democracy was just waiting to spring to life in Iraq — a peaceful multiethnic, multireligious society adhering to the rule of law. That longing to find in another country a mirror of ourselves trumped cold analysis and led to years of denial…” “…turning away from the inconvenient realities of ethnic and religious differences, the depth of animosities, of struggles for power and territory.” [emphasis mine]


Isn’t a peaceful multiethnic, multireligious society adhering to the rule of law a prerequisite for achieving sustainability, and humanity’s coping with climate crisis? If we can’t believe in that global possibility, if believing in it is just denial and turning away from inconvenient realities, *sigh* what hope is there?

“So the lesson I take away is never to underestimate hatred or history or the complexity of alien places.”

Eventually, I realized that the key to overcoming all of this hatred is educating people, raising their consciousness, that this hatred is premised on a beautiful lie. All of the historical animosity presumes that Earth will be here for us. It takes for granted that disputed territory will be liveable and productive as it had been.

In other words terrorists springing from ethnic and religious histories, rather than being the embodiment of evil, are nieve hopeful people wearing rose colored glasses. They’re two year olds fighting over a bowl of cereal, in a burning house.

Those who cling to ethnic hatred are the ones in denial or ignorance of inconvenient realities.

US needs to cut carbon emissions 100% by 2020!

Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber is among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists according to The Nation (editorial Oct 26,09). His study indicates that we have a two out of three chance of limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees C if the US cuts carbon emissions by 100 percent by 2020, and the whole world is carbon-free by 2050. To have a 75% chance of only a 2 degree rise we'd have to quit carbon even sooner. If we wait another decade or so, the odds of only 2 degree rise become 50-50. The study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion, and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person annually. Americans currently emit an average of 20 tons annually, that's why we have to reduce our consumption faster than other countries.

Schnellnhuber is a physicist specializing in chaos theory. He says he was terrified when he saw the numbers emerging from the study. Me too. Thing is, there's no way we can do this, even if everybody took the science seriously.

Separate functions for social structures

Fred W. Riggs's 1964 Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society maintained that developed countries operated efficiently by having separate structures for each function. Politics, religion, finance, manufacturing, entertainment, news, etc. were distinct. So an elected leader couldn't just waltz into a bank and demand money, or into a religious institution and tell them what to worship. By not comingling functions within one structure, each function could be performed most efficiently. A manufacturer taken over by powerful politicians would have its corporate officers replaced by political friends and relatives. Incompetent, they'd soon bring bankruptcy. Because private property was protected from those with religious or political power, the society was stable and more prosperous.

Now the US government has been taken hostage by corporations, who also control mass media news and the entertainment industry. Government financially supports banks, who pay lobbyists to influence government.

All of those formerly distinct functions intermingle. Nation states pale in comparison to interlocked international corporations. Is Globalization emerging on the basis of which interlocked corporate entities most efficiently externalize costs? How this be more efficient, even in the short term?

Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory is the most advanced approach I've seen to modelling change. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. His disciples don't seem to notice the corporate assumptions that people are goods whose value is determined by the free market and the environment is a free commons. If the first assembly line is analogous to the first street, to what is the first corporate interlock analogous?

All flows converge to one common destination, money in the stock market. Everything can be converted, one way or another, into this corpporate lifeblood stream. Hence the erosion of separate functions for structures.

The American right’s political strategy

“It takes considerable skill to convince people that something that is clearly good for them – like universal healthcare – is not.” (Gary Young, “A Method to Their Madness” The Nation, 09/28/09) The base lives “in a political parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don’t like established facts, so they come armed with their own.”

Patricia Williams says that the key to understanding the right’s base is that their “sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy” so that “the world must seem even more terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.” “… it’s the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down.” (Patricia J. Williams, “Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare” The Nation, 09/14/09)

What astonishes me is not that the right has disrupted and disoriented the national conversation not only among the “35 percent of the country … with whom there is no real means of engagement” but the entire nation. The Sept 28th editorial “The Ambush of Van Jones” says “… somehow a man working to help Americans invest in an alternative energy future ends us being branded an untouchable radical while a hysterical extremist’s delusions are validated.” (speaking of Glenn Beck’s fabricated controversy).

Yes, Young says, “Today the Internet distributes these slurs faster, and cable TV gives them more outlets.” But such media changes can’t account for the national political conversation’s plunge into paranoid lies. Nor is his facile accusation of “a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives” convincing. As the face of America twists into a surreal insanity, I struggle to comprehend how escalating feedback of corruption and media effects could be countered.

Visually Rich Communication

We’ve entered a universe of visual language memes, integrating emotive images with text. No longer are we limited to our own body language and facial expression. Anthropomorphized animal faces have invaded my self as surely as the automobile is an extension of the foot.

When Icanhascheezburger malfunctioned for two days, it was as if I had aphasia. I’d begun to think in this language, conjuring up LOLs to illustrate feelings as I composed posts.

Yesterday I saw a mobile computer called sixth sense, worn around the neck. It projects an interactive screen on any surface, and reads hand position to take commands. Baratunde was literally an image emitter. In meatspace, five years from now, we’ll be able to project images manually, to counterpoint our words.

A bigger picture of Global Warming

Sobering news from Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet of Sweden. They "have calculated the total energy emissions from the start of the industrial revolution in the 1880s to the modern day."
"They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming, during that period."

"using the increase in average global air temperature as a measure of global warming is an inadequate measure of climate change"

Net heat emissions blows carbon sequestration and nuclear energy out of the water as solutions to global warming. We can't use so-called clean coal. We have to stop using fossil fuel all together. Because, whether it takes 100 years or 1000 years to burn it all, the net heat released will overheat the planet and make it uninhabitable.

It's like a choice between boiling ourselves alive over low heat or high heat; our only sustainable choice is to turn off that heat.

"Although nuclear power does not produce carbon dioxide emissions in the same way as burning fossil fuels it does produce heat emissions equivalent to three times the energy of the electricity it generates and so contributes to global warming significantly, Nordell adds."

Realizing that net heat emissions is the real problem means there will never be a long-term solution using fusion or fission power. To prevent civilization collapse, we'll have to redesign to depend entirely on renewables such as solar power, wind, tides, and geothermal ... methods that merely redistribute the earth's heat instead of increasing it absolutely. It also becomes clear that overpopulation is a REAL limiting factor, not merely a technological challenge.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713085248.htm

Aagh!

A Glimmer of Sanity

It’s easier to see the old way we’ve made sense of the universe and ourselves disintegrating, than to grasp new ways to make sense that emerge from our information technology symbiosis.

cut out by ~klayemi on deviantART
For example, in “Cut Out” by Klayemi, we see the old self, represented as flat photograph, splitting. Whereas the narrative space of the old self portrait presupposed a two-dimensional “universe,” that invisible narrative space is itself the message of a cross-dimensional medium.

One thing for sure, the new way of making sense isn’t linear. Gone is the kitchen table upon which we separated toys into neat categories, and us from our toys. How do separate variables while that single plane folds out into mysterious dimensions? The assumption that we can sort identities and differences in uniform passive space and time supported our capacity for reason. Critical thinking slithers from our grasp as we stream through nested narrative spaces, our attention continually sliced by rapid-fire orienting responses. Working memory fails; our little fingers drop one toy after another as the next barks and sparkles.

How do we grope out shifting patterns on a fractal meta-sorting table, as new windows open and those held in overfull arms delete? What string will lead us to contradictions snuggled away from monitor view in five-layer nesting?

This video straddles our new threshold. It's limited penetration of cross-dimensional self-perception is, at least, suggestive.


The video's the antithesis of reason.It's just a hint of the kind of space within which meme-based "reason" will emerge.

meme-victims

Middle East conflict
Daily horror
Both sides oblivious to memetics.
Victims all
Saving up their anger stamps, their self-pity stamps
To cash them in
On guilt-free bombing
When it's their turn

Mind viruses feed
In their way
Twisting the universe...
Nothing exists
But Victim/Rescuer/Persecutor

Eric Berne would weep
To see
To hear
The "game" writ large