Human survival depends upon recognizing inefficiencies as the root cause of Climate Destabilization and taking control of human evolution to avoid them.
Two genders evolved because it was more efficient than hermaphrodite competition, such as sea slug penis fencing. As soon as one gender had genetic programming to bear the heaviest investment in the next generation, the free-rider gender was freed to compete amongst themselves with their "extra" energy. Physical competition does weed out deficient males with genetic predispositions for weakness or disease, but it's a crude decision tool. It introduces overwhelming inefficiencies - males which are extra big, extra strong, extra risky, and extra aggressive also have the advantage. So males evolve into bullies, designed above all for fighting and taking.
This inefficiency includes males killing babies, and not just camels, cats, and bull elephants. It's inefficient for human females to be reduced to baby machines, so half the brains and talent of the population is squandered. It's inefficient for men to loose the ability to recognize sadness in female faces, and similar traits of the psychopathy spectrum, because rapists have more babies.
Taking control of our own evolution will mean deciding what traits humans need for us to prosper together while controlling a planet, and selecting for those traits, as well as keeping our population level sustainable. Humanity 1.0, which evolved for a seemingly unlimited environment, is obsolete. For men, the most frightening part of that obsolescence is not just that Dominator Culture drives our race to self-destruction, but the instincts which underlie it. Men will no longer collectively and individually decide who gets to make babies and how often. "You want to cut off my balls?!" No. We need to separate sexual bliss (good) from domination/control (not good on a planetary scale).
Imagine engaging every adult in these choices globally (perhaps with well-designed computer gaming techniques), rather than having a Global Authority force it on you. Limits there will have to be. Which would you prefer?
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global warming. Show all posts
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Those mysterious forces beyond our control
How complicated problems and helplessness can lead to distorted reality
In How the Mountain of Climate Change Evidence Is Being Used to Undermine the Cause, Bill McKibben says the successful techniques of climate deniers resemble those of OJ Simpson's Dream Team of lawyers. When a mountain of evidence gets big enough, there will be a few cracks. Just "spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be." But, he says, the main reason for climate deniers success is, "They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control." [emphasis mine]
From Extreme fear: could you handle it? "The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol."
Michael Bader says that paranoia arises as people try" to make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness." "People can't tolerate feeling helpless and self-hating for very long. It's too painful, too demoralizing and too frightening. They have to find an antidote. They have to make sense of it all in a way that restores their sense of meaning, their feeling of agency, their self-esteem, and their belief in the possibility of redemption. They have to. They have no choice. That's just the way the mind works."
"The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally "explains it all." A narrative -- a set of beliefs about the way the world is and is supposed to be -- helps make sense of chaos. It reduces guilt and self-blame by projecting it onto someone else. And it restores a sense of agency by offering up an enemy to fight. Finally, it offers hope that if "they" -- the enemy, the conspirators -- can be avoided or destroyed, the paranoid person's core feelings of helplessness and devaluation will go away."
Climate Destabilization and Corporate Control of Civilization generate this situation
Blaming the patronising liberal elite and intellectual snobs misses the point, and embeds a self-defeating hierarchy (they understand stuff that I don't, so I must be dumb). All of us humans, including the highly educated and those who claim various expertise, are out of our depth. The world has become far too complicated for our evolved perceptions and our innate responses to grasp and respond adequately. Even coroporate institutions with their vaster resources, designed to maximize short-term profit, fail to forsee economic and ecological catastrophies of their own making.
We need new institutional structures designed to cope with civilization-on-the-edge-of-self-destruction. We need new human identities, that do not demand the impossible in order to avoid intolerable cortisol levels.
In How the Mountain of Climate Change Evidence Is Being Used to Undermine the Cause, Bill McKibben says the successful techniques of climate deniers resemble those of OJ Simpson's Dream Team of lawyers. When a mountain of evidence gets big enough, there will be a few cracks. Just "spend week after week dwelling on the cracks in a case, no matter how small they may be." But, he says, the main reason for climate deniers success is, "They’ve grasped the widespread feelings of powerlessness in the U.S., and the widespread suspicion that we’re being ripped off by mysterious forces beyond our control." [emphasis mine]
From Extreme fear: could you handle it? "The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol."
Michael Bader says that paranoia arises as people try" to make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness." "People can't tolerate feeling helpless and self-hating for very long. It's too painful, too demoralizing and too frightening. They have to find an antidote. They have to make sense of it all in a way that restores their sense of meaning, their feeling of agency, their self-esteem, and their belief in the possibility of redemption. They have to. They have no choice. That's just the way the mind works."
"The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally "explains it all." A narrative -- a set of beliefs about the way the world is and is supposed to be -- helps make sense of chaos. It reduces guilt and self-blame by projecting it onto someone else. And it restores a sense of agency by offering up an enemy to fight. Finally, it offers hope that if "they" -- the enemy, the conspirators -- can be avoided or destroyed, the paranoid person's core feelings of helplessness and devaluation will go away."
Climate Destabilization and Corporate Control of Civilization generate this situation
Blaming the patronising liberal elite and intellectual snobs misses the point, and embeds a self-defeating hierarchy (they understand stuff that I don't, so I must be dumb). All of us humans, including the highly educated and those who claim various expertise, are out of our depth. The world has become far too complicated for our evolved perceptions and our innate responses to grasp and respond adequately. Even coroporate institutions with their vaster resources, designed to maximize short-term profit, fail to forsee economic and ecological catastrophies of their own making.
We need new institutional structures designed to cope with civilization-on-the-edge-of-self-destruction. We need new human identities, that do not demand the impossible in order to avoid intolerable cortisol levels.
Friday, December 25, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
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!
"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!
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