Slouching toward disaster ...

Ocean Rebellion staged a theatrical action with a Boris Johnson head and an "Oil head" burning a boat on Marazion beach on June 5, 2021 in Cornwall, United Kingdom. (Photo: Gav Goulder/In Pictures via Getty Images)

As stated before in BRT, we're screwed. Nothing can be done to truly ameliorate the catastrophe known as global warming as the rich nations of the world are not ready to curb fossil emissions to the levels needed to make a difference as man hates change unless a disaster of biblical proportions happens.

 Ukraine is not that event.

 Regardless, canaries in the coal mine are screaming ... 

Last August, out of concern that their conclusions would be diluted by policymakers, a group of scientists leaked a draft of part three of the IPCC report—the U.N.'s sixth comprehensive climate assessment since 1992 and possibly the last to be published with enough time to avert the worst impacts of the crisis. The leaked draft asserted that global carbon emissions must peak by 2025 and all fossil fuel plants worldwide must be shuttered by the end of the decade to meet the Paris agreement's 1.5°C target.

Scientists in the Netherlands blocked an entrance to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy in The Hague on Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (Photo: Scientist Rebellion / @ScientistRebel1)

"Despite the escalating climate emergency and the total absence of emissions cuts, the framing of the final version of the SPM is still alarmingly reserved, docile, and conservative," Scientist Rebellion, an international alliance of academics who are advocating for systemic political and economic changes in line with scientific findings, said Tuesday in a statement.

"The science has never been clearer: to have any chance of retaining a habitable planet, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut radically now," the group continued. "Limiting warming to 1.5°C and responding to the climate emergency requires an immediate transformation across all sectors and strata of society, a mobilization of historic proportions: a climate revolution.

But again, it's all about the money.

Behind the scenes rich countries shamelessly worked to try and water down text relating to loss and damage, and finance for adaptation in developing countries.

PRESS RELEASE. AMSTERDAM, February 28, 2022 – Attempts by the US and developed countries to remove key climate finance terminology from the IPCC’s highly-anticipated Working Group II (WG2) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) have been condemned by global experts and activists as a desperate bid to evade responsibility. In what should have been a scientific, not political, process, rich countries battled to erase references to key concepts like loss and damage and to water down references to the scale of finance needed for adaptation. According to today’s report, climate impacts are occurring faster, and will worsen even sooner than previously predicted, necessitating an urgent increase in finance to help address climate change in developing countries.

Slouching toward disaster applies, does it not?

Criticality ...

 Photo by Bastien Nvs on Unsplash

The 1st law of thermodynamics rules as it's all about energy as said entity can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed. i.e.The flow of heat is a form of energy transfer. Heating is the natural process of moving energy to or from a system other than by work or the transfer of matter. With this being said, excess heat generated from thermodynamic processes to include erasing bits, is a killer for computers as well as being bad for the environment, a problem needing a solution now.

In case you had not noticed, computers are hot—literally. A laptop can pump out thigh-baking heat, while data centers consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours each year—comparable to the energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. The carbon footprint of information and communication technologies as a whole is close to that of fuel use in the aviation industry. And as computer circuitry gets ever smaller and more densely packed, it becomes more prone to melting from the energy it dissipates as heat.

 Entropy also rules.

In 1961 physicist Rolf Landauer of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., showed that conventional computing incurs an unavoidable cost in energy dissipation—basically, in the generation of heat and entropy. That is because a conventional computer has to sometimes erase bits of information in its memory circuits in order to make space for more. Each time a single bit (with the value 1 or 0) is reset, a certain minimum amount of energy is dissipated—which Ray and Crutchfield have christened “the Landauer.” Its value depends on ambient temperature: in your living room, one Landauer would be around 10–21 joule. (For comparison, a lit candle emits on the order of 10 joules of energy per second.)

Is there a way out as the faster machines get, the hotter they get.

Possibly ...

Harnessing a particle’s velocity for computing is not an entirely new idea. Momentum computing is closely analogous to a reversible-computing concept called ballistic computing that was proposed in the 1980s: in it, information is encoded in objects or particles that move freely through the circuits under their own inertia, carrying with them some signal that is used repeatedly to enact many logical operations. If the particle interacts elastically with others, it will not lose any energy in the process. In such a device, once the ballistic bits have been “launched,” they alone power the computation without any other energy input. The computation is reversible as long as the bits continue bouncing along their trajectories. Information is only erased, and energy is only dissipated, when their states are read out.

Whereas, in ballistic computing, a particle’s velocity simply transports it through the device, allowing the particle to ferry information from input to output, Crutchfield says, in momentum computing, a particle’s velocity and position collectively allow it to embody a unique and unambiguous sequence of states during a computation. This latter circumstance is the key to reversibility and thus low dissipation, he adds, because it can reveal exactly where each particle has been.

It's all about reading out particle states using quantum computing in real time, to lessen the heat equation. Unfortunately, QC's a tech far from being practical in the year of our lord 2022 in addition to the impact Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle may have on any given computation.

To be continued.

The 3rd Law: A system's entropy approaches a constant value as its temperature approaches absolute zero.

a) Single possible configuration for a system at absolute zero, i.e., only one microstate is accessible. b) At temperatures greater than absolute zero, multiple microstates are accessible due to atomic vibration (exaggerated in the figure)

Hunger Games ...

People going hungry should not happen but it does and many die because man does not think about the world but rather about locale and money as both have tremendous impact on who gets to eat and when. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the world's food shortage's getting worse, not only because of the war but also on what is happening to the planet thanks to global warming.

The humanitarian disaster produced by Russia’s needless invasion of Ukraine shocks the conscience: 10 million Ukrainians displaced and innumerable Ukrainians killed. But because Ukraine and Russia are both major food exporters, the human toll will grow much larger, far from Ukraine’s borders.

As Ukraine’s farms have turned into battlefields, uncertainty around the country’s agricultural exports, as well as Russia’s, has created a global food emergency by driving up the prices of wheat, corn, soybeans, fertilizers and sunflower oil.

Note: Includes the top 50 countries by share of G.D.P. Wheat prices as of March 23.Sources: 

Gro Intelligence, World Bank, F.A.O.

The prices of commodities like wheat and corn are global, but their shocks are inequitable. Wealthier countries and people can absorb sharp price increases. Meanwhile, people in poorer countries, like Sudan and Afghanistan, are finding it far more expensive to eat. In Sudan, rising wheat prices have caused the price of bread to roughly double. Because Ukraine and Russia exported livestock feed and fertilizer before the war, the cost and difficulty of producing food will increase in the months and years ahead.

The GW factor

Before the war, roughly 811 million people around the world did not have enough to eat. That number could increase tremendously this hunger season, the time between spring planting and fall harvest when food often runs out.

Climate change will compound these risks. In key agricultural regions, drought conditions are worse today than they’ve been in decades.

Note: Drought severity is measured by the Gro Drought Index, which is derived from satellite data and includes 46 variables (such as precipitation, temperature and soil moisture). The index also accounts for differences in what drought conditions look like in different parts of the world.Source: Gro Intelligence

The Dark Ages loom ...

Channeling Hendrix

Being an old geezer, yours truly has seen just about all the big name jazz and rock groups in the late 60's save for Cream, the Beatles and the Stones but I did see Hendrix, twice, the first at the Garden wondering how in god's name was Jimi creating his kind of sound in real time, never to be duplicated by any other musician to this day, no matter how much tech has evolved since 1970. With this in mind, the NYTimes piece titled Why We Can’t Quit the Guitar Solo resonates as said performances done by various musicians will never die no matter what the current trend in popular music may be at any given point in time.

The musical trope has become

less of a fixture in mainstream rock. 

Indeed, mostof the Grammy nominees in the rock 

song and performance categories* this year 

did not even include guitar solos.

Bob Marley can equate to this as his work was orchestral and profound, needing not virtuosity but rather exquisite ensemble playing to the max.

That, to me, is the power of the guitar solo. It’s a moment of risk for the player, a demonstrative attempt to connect sonically, physically and emotionally with the audience — even if only for a moment. The precariousness is part of what the audience responds to, explained Vernon Reid, the guitarist of Living Colour, when I asked him about his experience with the guitar solo. (Like many of the musicians quoted in this piece, he is a friend.)

“In all performance,” he told me, “when somebody is willing to go to an edge, and the audience is gripped by the drama of the attempt, it’s an electrifying thing.”

Art of all persuasions is all about risk but you already know that, right? :)

Horology ...

Photograph Bulgari

ho·rol·o·gy

/həˈräləjē/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the study and measurement of time.

   • the art of making clocks and watches.

     
     

Exclusive, exceedingly expensive and technologically exotic, watches of this variety are the esoteric toys of the urber rich, wonderful to look at but out of reach for the mortals of the world.

Watches & Wonders 2022 landed this week, and with it the watch industry dropped lab-grown gems, light-sucking cases, and 3D-printed gold.

GENEVA’S WATCHES & Wonders fair, essentially the CES of the watch world, brings together almost 40 of the industry's biggest brands, including Rolex, Patek Philippe, Tudor, and IWC, alongside a sprinkling of smaller, independent marques, to all reveal at once their major launches for the year. It's big business. Despite inevitable Covid-related downturns—particularly in an industry still resistant to ecommerce—in 2021, Swiss watch exports totaled a value of more than $24 billion.

Photograph Bulgari

The $440,000 (£332,695) Octo Finissimo Ultra is just 1.8-mm thick—that's all the cogs and mechanics crammed into a space with less breadth than a nickel—and has the feel of little more than a piece of paper wrapped around the wrist. Along with its eight patents, it packs in some  2022 zeitgeist content in the form of a QR code laser-cut into the circular barrel containing the mainspring (which is wound up to power the watch). There are just 10 watches being made, each with a different QR code that will connect to a Metaverse site for the owner to explore, including an NFT-attached video artwork that’s unique to each watch.

Photograph H. Moser & Cie

You can't buy this ...

Independent watchmaker H Moser & Cie has the unique license in watchmaking to use Vantablack, the super-black coating that, with 99.965 percent light absorption, is the darkest human-made material on the planet. So far it has produced a number of watches with bewitching Vantablack dials, but at this year's Watches & Wonders it has revealed an entire watch covered in the substance.

Viewed against a Vantablack background, it’s almost invisible, save for its white and red hands. Sadly, it isn’t commercially available: H Moser reports that the substance is, for now, too fragile for wearing but that ways are being researched to strengthen the structure and make it more shock-resistant. Watch this space (not that you can see much of anything if you do).

The coolest of them all ...

The Midnight Planétarium watch is an incredible feat of engineering, design and artistic craftsmanship. Besides showing the time, it also accurately displays the movement of six planets in our solar system as they orbit the Sun.

Each of those six planets is represented by a precious or semiprecious stone selected to represent that planet’s color – serpentine for Mercury, chloromelanite for Venus, turquoise for Earth, red jasper for Mars, blue agate for Jupiter and sugilite for Saturn. The two other planets in our solar system were excluded from this astronomical watch because the lengths of their orbits would make their movements on the watch imperceptible and impractical – Uranus orbits the sun in 84 Earth years, and Neptune makes the trip in 164.

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', Into the future. - Steve Miller Band

Miscellany ...

Flagstone/it's not what it seems

Slade's

Waiting for Godot

Flowline

 

Water, Water everywhere ...

 Illustration by Andrea Ucini

Water, water everywhere, Nor any water to drink - Samuel Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Sounds like Nestle and the push to privatize water where one has to pay exorbitant fees in order to stay alive. Something that's somewhat amiss don't you think?

It was 2015, and the city of Missoula, Montana, was fighting to take control of its water supply. Missoula’s privately owned waterworks had recently been sold to Mountain Water, a company owned by the private equity behemoth Carlyle Group. The mayor, John Engen, approved the sale after being wined and dined in Washington and led to believe that Missoula’s water was but a drop in Carlyle’s bucket, and the firm would voluntarily sell the system to the city. But after Missoula made its bid for the waterworks for about $50 million, and the company came back asking for $120 million, talks stalled.

But there is hope ...

As Cohen and Mikaelian note in The Privatization of Everything, citizens have successfully challenged and defeated privatization plans everywhere. “Between 2003 and 2019,” they note, “seventy-one U.S. communities took back their water, following a global trend that saw 2,400 cities in fifty-eight countries bringing water and other essential services under public control.” On a practical level, people can fight to share resources and succeed.

In Missoula, the judge presiding over the town’s water system didn’t see Laffer’s wisdom and ruled against the private owners. Missoula regained control of its water. In an interview after the case was resolved, Mayor Engen reflected, “We still had folks saying—you know—what kind of socialists are you?” To most people, the system appeared to be working fine. “But as the case wore on,” he said, “and evidence was presented in court and other arenas, it became more clear to folks that they were, in effect, getting robbed by the private investors and that trend wasn’t going to change without public ownership.” “Water is essential to life,” he said. “And a city that does not control its destiny through water is likely to suffer in the long term.”

The Water Thief looms.

Anoxia ...

 A drop in oxygen levels is putting ocean ecosystems on life support.

an·ox·i·a

/aˈnäksēə/

Learn to pronounce

noun

TECHNICAL

1. an absence of oxygen.

   • MEDICINE

     an absence or deficiency of oxygen reaching the tissues; severe hypoxia.

     "death due to anoxia resulting from strangulation"

     
     

     GW, the existential threat that keeps on giving is now depriving the oceans of the world oxygen, courtesy the 6th extension event of our own making.

     
     

     To whit ...

     
     

     People who make their living catching fish on the open ocean first noticed the strange phenomenon a few decades ago. It occurred in the shadow zones, the spots between the great ocean currents where sea water doesn’t circulate, off the coasts of Peru, West Africa, and California. The fisher people shared the knowledge among them like a common secret, a bounty that had an even stranger explanation: Sometimes, when the conditions were right, fish would swim closer to the surface of the seas. This made them easier to catch, as the shimmering hordes pushed their way upward, where sunlight filtered through the waters and the oxygen was rich. For the fishing trawlers, this was a wild boon. For the fish, it was something else—the shadow zones, low in oxygen, were expanding, and wildlife habitats were shrinking. Swimming upward, the fish were trying to catch their breath.

     
     

     It wasn’t until the late 2000s that scientists formally identified what was happening. Observing time-series data from a handful of research stations in Hawaii, Bermuda, and the North Pacific, researchers noticed that the world’s oceans had been losing oxygen, probably for half a century. The existence of these shadow zones—where ocean circulation wasn’t robust and marine life sparse, called Oxygen Minimum Zones, or OMZs—was already well documented. But scientists found that these areas were expanding; they also saw that the ocean was deoxygenating on a systematic level, affecting every area of the seas. In addition to providing places where marine wildlife can thrive, oxygen levels are a critical harbinger of the planet’s health—and unlike ocean acidification, another ecological crisis affecting the pH levels of the oceans, deoxygenation is seen as a change to which adaptation is impossible.

     
     

     

     
     

     WE ARE DEVO: During the Late Devonian Extinction, around 360 million years ago, 75 percent of the planet’s species, like these Dunkleosteus, disappeared forever. 

     Illustration by Aunt Spray / Shutterstock.

     
     

     We are killing ourselves as we speak.

Canton CT

 History in CT is alive and well, something readily seen in this short clip showing Canton's take on a subject that never goes out of date. :)

55% ...

 

CEO of BASF Martin Brudermuller

Russia has Europe by the short hairs as the notion the US can bailout the continent via opening up the oil reserve for six months is but a pipe dream.

To whit ...

CEO of Germany's multinational BASF SE, the world's largest chemical producer, has warned that curbing or cutting off energy imports from Russia would bring into doubt the continued existence of small and medium-sized energy companies, and further would likely spiral Germany into its most "catastrophic" economic crisis going back to the end of World War 2.

But in the meantime, Brudermuller described that "It's not enough that we all turn down the heating by 2 degrees now" given that "Russia covers 55 percent of German natural gas consumption." He emphasized that if Russian gas disappeared overnight, "many things would collapse here" - given that "we would have high levels of unemployment, and many companies would go bankrupt. This would lead to irreversible damage." He continued:

"To put it bluntly: This could bring the German economy into its worst crisis since the end of the Second World War and destroy our prosperity. For many small and medium-sized companies in particular, it could mean the end. We can't risk that!"

Any questions?