Daisyworld

No economics talk here. No rants about the fed, security or on why we are being screwed because our future, as envisioned by James Lovelock, presents a far darker scenario then these aforementioned "trivial" events facing the world today.

"The small window of short-term hope he left open in Revenge is closed in this year’s Vanishing. In its place is a long-term hope that humanity in some form will survive the present century, though barely. The result is a dark and contrarian work that seeks to demolish the terms of the climate debate while mocking our response to the crisis at the personal, national, and species level.

Lovelock has not arrived at his views lightly. They are the product of years spent carefully considering the known science through the revolutionary and frequently misunderstood lens he began developing 40 years ago while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena. Gaia Theory holds that Earth possesses a sophisticated planetary intelligence that responds to levels of heat from the sun in such a way as to maintain a climate homeostasis supportive of life. In four decades of research and experiment, the most famous being the “Daisyworld” model, Lovelock has overcome the once-widespread skepticism of his peers to officially move Gaia from a Hypothesis to a Theory."

Everything has a cost, there is no free lunch, period.
As proof, read the Laws of Thermodynamics to see why.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Every time one hears a bloviator like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman states categorically that Climate Change is but a myth, something not to be considered by anyone of good faith, should consider this...

"The rapidity with which the planet is losing its northern ice cap continues to astonish experts. The defrosting northern pole is one of the prime drivers of Earth's climate system and is changing global weather patterns in unpredictable ways.


The Arctic ice melt is also accelerating the rate of climate change beyond what humanity is doing with every barrel of oil, tonne of coal or cubic meter of gas burned."

The frightening thing about Global Warming is the fact it's only just beginning...

"One consequence is the acceleration of global warming as the Arctic flips from all white to dark blue, with the ocean absorbing tremendous amounts of heat from the 24-hour summer sun. That shift in albedo - from white to dark - is expected to add an additional amount of heat energy of about 0.3 watts per square meter over the entire land and water surface of the planet, calculates Stephen Hudson of the Norwegian Polar Institute.


That's enough additional energy to power an LED night light for each square meter of the 510 million square meters that comprise the Earth's surface. That will raise global temperatures about 0.25 C, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota told IPS.


Of course, most of that tremendous amount of heat will reside first in the Arctic, where temperatures are already an average of three to five degrees C higher than 30 to 40 years ago. This winter parts of the Arctic were 21 C above normal for a month.


All that additional heat threatens to light the fuse of the world's biggest "carbon bomb", the vast permafrost region spanning 13 million square kilometers across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of northern Europe."

At this point in time, it looks like James Lovelock's dire view of the negative impact Global Warming is beginning to have on the world may be spot on even though a very sizable percentage of people (in this country)  continued to deny its existence because of the subtlety of change, something vastly different from the speed of tv or the web where instant gratification is not fast enough.

Seen below is a video of Lovelock's take on the emergence of the 900 lb gorilla no one wants to talk about as we move further into the 21st century.

Connectivity 101

‘I am not hopeful of a positive outcome at Cop26, knowing who is participating. I was not invited to Glasgow, though that is hardly a surprise.’ Photograph: Magdalena Bujak/Alamy

Years ago, yours truly talked about Daisy World and James Lovelock and his uncompromising view on climate change and what it means for humanity. As you, my loyal readers know, the notion of everything's connected is true through the expression of quantum mechanics and the two laws of thermodynamics, something a lot of so called experts seem to not understand in any way shape or fashion. Perhaps this is why Lovelock was not invited to the UN global conference dealing with this existential issue but this artificial separation of the causes of global warming will change once we have a catastrophe as man never changes until we experience one, right?

I don’t know if it is too late for humanity to avert a climate catastrophe, but I am sure there is no chance if we continue to treat global heating and the destruction of nature as separate problems.

That is the wrongheaded approach of the United Nations, which is about to stage one big global conference for the climate in Glasgow, having just finished a different big global conference for biodiversity in Kunming.

This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.

Almost 60 years ago, I suggested our planet self-regulated like a living organism. I called this the Gaia theory, and was later joined by biologist Lynn Margulis, who also espoused this idea. Both of us were roundly criticised by scientists in academia. I was an outsider, an independent scientist, and the mainstream view then was the neo-Darwinist one that life adapts to the environment, not that the relationship also works in the other direction, as we argued. In the years since, we have seen just how much life – especially human life – can affect the environment. Two genocidal acts – suffocation by greenhouse gases and the clearance of the rainforests – have caused changes on a scale not seen in millions of years.

It's all about the water ...

Winter berries

The amount of global warming depends hugely on the properties of water. When cold ice forms, much of it is white snow. This reflects the sunlight back to space and is cooling. But when it is warm, the water vapour in the air is a powerful greenhouse gas that makes it warmer still.

Much of the confusion over global heating comes about because of the huge quantities of heat needed to change the state of water. Few are aware that to melt a gram of ice takes 80 calories, enough heat to raise the temperature of 1ml of water to 80C. Try an ice cube in your boiling hot tea.

Warnings that once seemed like the doom scenarios of science fiction are now coming to pass. We are entering into a heat age in which the temperature and sea levels will be rising decade by decade until the world becomes unrecognisable. We could also be in for more surprises. Nature is non-linear and unpredictable, never more than at a time of transition.

Then imagine how much heat was needed to melt large areas of the polar ice cap during the recent summer and how much hotter the world would have been if the ice had not been there. No wonder there is confusion about whether there is global heating or not.

Curvature

The Ant & the Grasshopper

We are lousy stewards of the planet. We pollute, we take and we plunder and nature is beginning to fight back. If we don't change our ways, our hegemony on planet earth is over. BRT has talked about this quite often as climate change is the 900 lb. gorilla looming ever larger even though we continue to believe it's a hollow threat that "really doesn't matter" if we close our eyes and pretend it's not there,

Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.

When this is combined with James Lovelock's dark view, it may be too late to make a difference.

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

I, for one, hope he's wrong hut his take on a catastrophic event like the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet acting as wake up call is spot on.


World's largest ice sheet melting faster than expected: East Antarctic sheet shedding 57bn tonnes of ice a year and contributing to sea level rises, according to Nasa aerial survey.

The Ant & The Grasshopper sounds pretty apropos if you ask me.

50 50 @ best ...

The Taj Mahal is dying thanks to man's never ending ability to soil the planet and it's treasures no matter what the cost may be.

But the Taj Mahal has indeed begun to lose its shine. Its foundations are weakening and cracks are becoming larger, and deeper in the marble dome and the monument. The upper parts of the minarets are said to be on the verge of collapse. In high winds earlier this year, two pillars on an outer building fell to the ground.

Greenland's ice is melting at ever increasing rates due, in part, to the loss of albedo in the Arctic, a prime driver in accelerating global warming on planet earth.

Greenland's ice sheet melt has 'gone into overdrive' and is now 'off the charts'

"Melting of the Greenland ice sheet has gone into overdrive," said Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University and lead author of the study. "Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years," he said.

Ice loss from Greenland is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise, which is predicted to lead to inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities around the world over the next several decades and centuries.

Like Greenland's ice sheet ... 

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

The world’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising at a faster pace in 2018 than they did last year, researchers said Wednesday, the latest evidence that planet-warming pollution is proliferating again after a three-year lull in the middle of the decade. That trend is accelerating the earth’s collision course with some of the most severe consequences of climate change, scientists warned.

Worldwide, carbon emissions are expected to increase by 2.7 percent in 2018, according to studies published in three respected scientific journals by the Global Carbon Project. Emissions rose 1.6 percent last year, the researchers said.

James Lovelock was right. We're screwed. Earth will survive but us? 50 50 @ best if we stay the present course as we move further into the 21st century.

The World Island yet again ...

 

BRT Repost ... Back in 2015, yours truly chanced upon Sir Halford Mackinder's extraordinary take on world politics with his notion that the future of world power will reside in Euro-Asia, the great landmass connecting three continents forever separate from North and South America and Australia. Seems his prescient analysis is spot on given just how inept and bankrupt the US (and west) has become regarding it's obsession with endless war and it's total lack of understanding why The Art of War really matters for the continued wellbeing of any entity wishing to call itself a viable nation.

In 2022, this 2015 notion's accurate to a fault but now, the impact of GW on the fate of the world looms ever larger as phase transitions are never linear and proof of that is seen by estimates of water rise in just 30 years exceeding the guesstimates made by researchers made just a few years ago. 

With continued ocean and atmospheric warming, sea levels will likely rise for many centuries at rates higher than that of the current century. In the United States, almost 40 percent of the population lives in relatively high-population-density coastal areas, where sea level plays a role in flooding, shoreline erosion, and hazards from storms. Globally, eight of the world's 10 largest cities are near a coast, according to the U.N. Atlas of the Oceans.

Global sea level has been rising over the past century, and the rate has increased in recent decades. In 2014, global sea level was  2.6 inches 67 mm above the 1993 average—the highest annual average in the satellite record (1993-present). Sea level continues to rise at a rate of  about one-eighth of an inch 3.2 mm per year.

Click https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ to see how high the ocean will rise. Intense without question. 

What this means to countries and the fate of the world becomes scary, dire predictions made by James Lovelock 15 years ago and now, with Alfred M. Mccoy, a superb writer who takes the long view on issues as serious as this.

Alfred McCoy, Professor of History at UW-Madison. His new book is Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

We’re in a time of growing belligerence of a kind unknown since the Cold War. It’s already taken us to the edge of conflict with nuclear-armed great powers, whether in Ukraine or Taiwan and the South China Sea.  Meanwhile, here at home (and in other countries globally), internal divisions, flaring anger, and violence are growing. And yet the true violence, the true war, the one those aggressive great powers are already waging in a major way goes largely unnoticed and remarkably undealt with, perhaps because it’s a genuine world war on humanity and the planet itself.

In case you’re not living in the American Southwest, that region has been experiencing “megadrought” conditions.  (The whole west is, in fact, drought-stricken right now.) And that would be bad enough, but a new study by climate scientists indicates that the Southwest has been going through “the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years” and, no surprise, climate change is significantly to blame. We’re talking about a catastrophe — one that, as yet, shows no signs of abating and that in the long run is only going to get worse.

If lack of water is a problem in the Southwest, here’s the “good” — actually, terrible — news: this country’s coasts are going to be anything but short of water.  According to another new study, sea levels around this country are going to rise by something like a foot in the next three decades (more even than the global average). In other words, while parts of the U.S. broil, other parts will functionally drown, with ever more disastrous flooding occurring ever more often. Again, this is due to the never-ending burning of fossil fuels (and toss in as well phenomena like the melting of Russia’s permafrost, potentially releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse-gas methane into the atmosphere).

The World Island ...

Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I’m not talking about the future development of flying cars, cryogenics, or even as-yet-unimaginable versions of space travel.

After leading the world for the past 75 years, the United States is ever so fitfully losing its grip on global hegemony. As Washington’s power begins to fade, the liberal international system it created by founding the United Nations in 1945 is facing potentially fatal challenges.

After more than 180 years of Western global dominion, leadership is beginning to move from West to East, where Beijing is likely to become the epicenter of a new world order that could indeed rupture longstanding Western traditions of law and human rights.

The new hegemon

Amid this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, Beijing seems to have an underlying design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. Its goal: to forge a unitary market that will soon cover the vast Eurasian land mass. This scheme will consolidate China’s control over a continent that is home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. In the end, it could also break the U.S. geopolitical grip over a region that has long been the core of, and key to, its global power. The foundation for such an ambitious transnational scheme is a monumental construction effort that, in just two decades, has already covered China and much of Central Asia with a massive triad of energy pipelines, high-speed rail lines, and highways.

A short lived hegemon 

In its hell-bent drive for development, in other words, China is digging its own grave (and ours as well).

To whit

Simultaneously, soaring temperatures are expected to devastate the North China Plain between Beijing and Shanghai, one of that country’s prime agricultural regions currently inhabited by 400 million people, nearly a third of that country’s population. It could, in fact, potentially become one of the most lethal places on the planet.

“This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” said Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a climate specialist at MIT who published his findings in the journal Nature Communications. Between 2070 and 2100, he estimates, the region could face hundreds of periods of “extreme danger” and perhaps five lethal periods of 35° Wet Bulb Temperature (where a combination of heat and high humidity prevents the evaporation of the sweat that cools the human body). After just six hours under such conditions, a healthy person at rest will die.

Rather than sudden and catastrophic, the impact of climate change in North China is likely to be incremental and cumulative, escalating relentlessly with each passing decade. If the “Chinese century” does indeed start around 2030, it’s unlikely to last long once its main financial center at Shanghai is flooded out and its agricultural heartland is baking in insufferable heat.

End game.

After 2050, the international community will face a growing contradiction, even a head-on collision, between the two foundational principles of the current world order: national sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations have the sovereign right to seal their borders, the world will have no way of protecting the human rights of the 200 million to 1.2 billion climate-change refugees expected to be created by 2050, both within their own borders and beyond. Faced with such extreme disorder, it is just possible that the nations of this planet might agree to cede some small portion of their sovereignty to a global government set up to cope with the climate crisis.

The choice is up to us if civilization is to survive.

A planet ever more battered by climate change, one in which neither an American nor a Chinese “century” will have any meaning, will certainly need a newly empowered world order that can supersede national sovereignty to protect the most fundamental and transcendent of all human rights: survival. The environmental changes in the offing are so profound that anything less than a new form of democratic global governance will mean not just incessant conflicts but, in all likelihood, disaster of an almost-unimaginable kind. And no surprise there, since we’ll be dealing with a planet all too literally on the brink.

Any questions?

An existential threat

BRT has talk often about climate change and the ramifications of same as the threat is an existential one, not to earth but to us rubes living on her. When combined with environmental degradation, resource depletion and over population, the situation is dire to say the least with scientists now openly talking about a runaway GW effect that could introduce a population control mechanism of truly biblical proportions as articulated by James Lovelock over 10 years ago.

The Ant & the Grasshopper, courtesy Aesop, is apt here as America continues to deny the obvious ongoing event of GW being writ ever larger as we move further into the 21st century.

IN a field one summer’s day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.   

 “Why not come and chat with me,” said the Grasshopper, “instead of toiling and moiling in that way?”  

“I am helping to lay up food for the winter,” said the Ant, “and recommend you to do the same.”   

Why bother about winter?” said the Grasshopper; “we have got plenty of food at present.” But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil. When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food, and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew:

        “IT IS BEST TO PREPARE FOR THE DAYS OF NECESSITY.”

Crossing the Rubicon ...

Twilight

This pix, taken a few years ago, sums up a possible future for man as civilization moves further into the Anthropocene and it's tangental relationship to all things related to tech, the environment and to earth as everything's connected and ... everything's quantum where certitude is but an illusion,

3500 articles, musings on thousands of postings and guesstimates, both accurate and inaccurate, populate this blog to the nth degree but you, my loyal readers, already know that so here's to crossing the Rubicon, a most perilous journey we will all be taking whether we like it or not.

No connects or numbering schemes but rather a random walk through a partial list of issues most dire with climate change being No. 1.

Covid-19 is but a weak introduction to what's coming, a pandemic to be sure, but nothing compared to GW and the impact it will have on the world.

For starters, the equator will soon become uninhabitable. Animals and plants are migrating away as we speak but little is said as to what species will survive as they make their desperate move. This also involves us and the impact on the food supply as growing food will move north and south with large swaths of land unable to sustain civilization due to not only excess heat but also loss of water as seen by the move on Lake Mead to restrict waster supply when the water level goes below 1047'.

2020-30 will be remembrance of species lost. Researchers discovered ocean life died much quicker than land in the Great Dying of 250 million years ago. Does this mean the same for us as the acceleration of GW is happening thousands of times faster than the 30,000 year timeframe of the Permian eruption of the Siberian Traps in northern Russia.

2040-50, the real bite of GW begins, where temps of 3+ take hold and Russia and Canada become the bread baskets of the world while Cat 6 hurricanes ply the Atlantic with devastating power. This scenario is already baked including the melting of the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland as the loss of albedo is a prime GW accelerant and we haven't even discussed the release of ever more methane from the rapidly melting permafrost and ocean located in and around the arctic. Water rise - 2-3 meters?

Forget Florida and cities on the coast, right?

Too many people add to the mix. 8 billion and counting. Not good, not sustainable but Gaia's thinking about a drastic solution to this issue, something Lovelock talked about over 15 years ago.

Mass migrations loom.

AI - the open ended tech where we have lost contro but don't know it yet but we will, soon.

Question: When does AI become sentient? 5 years, next year, 10? One never knows but whenever anyone says AI cannot be this or that, remember the Rand Corporation's take on the net and the fact only 20 systems will be ever be needed to run civilization. 

The military goes full tilt into autonomous bots armed to the teeth. Who's the enemy? How can they be identified? Is man the enemy? Skynet's happening as digital swarms are already being ramped up, connected as one entity driven by, you guessed it, AI. 

The needs of AI differ from us. What does that mean?

Cybersecurity - no system is invulnerable. Everything can be hacked. The biggie is shutting down infrastructure, you know, access to electricity, heat, medical and water supply among significant others. Countries all over the world are capping on this as tech is cheap. All it takes is brainpower, desire to hack and access to the web to make it happen. Is this the end of the world?

Biotech - CRISPR and manipulation of DNA, combined with AI as enhancer, what could possibly go wrong? Pandemics are us, not only with upcoming labs on a chip used by twisted individuals to create bugs but also of the natural kind as GW disrupts all things related to life. Think mosquitoes ...

Continued abuses ...

30% of all arable land is used to feed Bessie, Loghorn T. Fog Horn and Porky, an unsustainable way to feed man, not to mention the accompanying manure, urine and fertilizers used to leverage the land in addition to rampant injections of steroids and antibiotics, along with genetic engineering, to said fauna, to create fast growing franken foods, packaged for us rubes in all shapes and sizes, to consume to our heart's content.

Plastics and chemicals of all kinds, including micro plastics in our air, soil and of course, food, invade everything, something most disturbing as researchers are now finding out this deadly combination adversely impacts fertility. Children of Men anyone? ... by possibly 2045.

The car, ubiquitous in the US because there is no high speed or medium speed rail of any consequence in the US, pollutes the planet to no end as most are gas powered. Maybe we should ask China how they build high speed rail as they are really good at it while the US does nothing. Going electric is not all that great either as the grid, powered by natural gas and oil, power these things. Question, where will the batteries go? Can they be recycled? Good question to ask is it not?

Suburbs ... journey to nowhere, ditto strip malls. Both ecologically disastrous. 

Planes, another prime driver of fossil fuels continues unabated. The production and distribution of ever more stuff never ceases to amaze, particularly in terms of landfill when said stuff become a throwaway for the ages. Think China on this one. 

Subsidies to fossil fuel polluters instead of developing sustainables has been the US mantra for years. It looks like this is slowly changing but it will take time, something we no longer have.

Nuclear war becomes a possible given just how many countries hate each other.

Resource depreciation, environmental degradation and poverty, combined with starvation and over population, become prime drivers for revolution and violence all over the world.

Right now, it's lip service. Nothing of real consequence is being done because that means enormous change for all of us, an issue not be be addressed until the real shit hits the fan. Time frame - 2050.

One point perspective

The Road to Hell ...

BRT has waxed poetic about Global Warming and the ramifications of same beginning with James Lovelock's dire warning regarding GW in 2007 to 2018 with this latest piece from Aeon describing the anthropogenic version of a new Cretaceous with horrifying consequences that will end civilization as we know it by 2100 if nothing is done.

Last November, the COP23 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn reported that warming by 3°C by 2100 is now the realistic expectation. With no check on emissions, we are on course to see preindustrial levels of CO2 double (from 280 to 560 ppm, or parts per million) by 2050 – and then double again by 2100. In short, we’ll be generating climate conditions last experienced during the Cretaceous period (145-65.95 million years ago) when CO2 levels reached over 1,000 ppm. What might that mean, given that we already achieve such levels of CO2 in bedrooms at night and in poorly ventilated crowded places, and when we know that, under sustained conditions of such high carbon-dioxide concentration, people suffer severe cognitive problems?

It gets "better".

We have recently become aware of a red line that humans are going to hit long before we approach Cretaceous conditions. In 2010, researchers showed that our species cannot survive for more than six hours at what’s called a ‘wet bulb’ temperature of 35°C (95°F). Wet bulb here means 100 per cent humidity, so it’s not 35°C as we know it. But in the great Indian agricultural belts of the Indus and Ganges, high-40s temperatures combined with 50 per cent humidity (which equates to that wet-bulb temperature of 35°C ) are going to prevail within decades.

While this is happening in hot agricultural regions, the urban world will face a perhaps even greater catastrophe. The UN’s most-likely temperature-rise prediction of 3°C would see forests growing in the Arctic, and entail the loss of most coastal cities through irreversible sea-level rise by the end of the century.

30 years ago we could have stopped this slow motion disaster but did not. To whit ...

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

Jule Charney, the father of modern meteorology. From the M.I.T. Museum

The Road to Hell ... indeed.

Thanks John for turning me onto this.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Trinity: I know why you're here, Neo. I know what you've been doing... why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer. You're looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.
Neo: What is the Matrix?
Trinity: The answer is out there, Neo, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.

I quote this after chancing upon the Shadow Elite, a book that describes those who "really" run the world and the impact they are having on civilization. Chilling, non-conspiratorial and succinct, Janine R. Wedel's writing reminds me of The Matrix, something evanescent, mysterious and subtlety powerful.

"In today's messy world, trust is elusive. People we once held up as experts for their credentials can no longer be trusted to be impartial. Many public figures and "experts" of all stripes -- left, right, or center -- perform overlapping roles without fully disclosing them. While they purport to operate in the public interest, these "flexians" structure their roles and involvements to serve their own agendas. Their true loyalties and agendas are not fully revealed or easily detected. Practicing what has been called an "evolving door," they move beyond the revolving door of the past.

These players are a logical product of the way that governing and society have been reconstituted in recent decades (eased by such trends as the explosion of consulting and other private entities performing government functions, the boom of government advisory boards, the global fragmentation of authority wrought by the end of the Cold War, and the embrace of what Stephen Colbert has dubbed "truthiness"). Meanwhile, other parts of society and culture, like our monitoring and accountability systems, have not kept up. Thus, while ostensibly serving the public interest, these players can also serve their own. And how would we even know?"

In many ways, this disconnect between "governance" and power reminds me of the lack of understanding most people have about tech and the net, two constructs changing society in ways which extend beyond our ability to fully comprehend, much less manage at a meaningful level. While reading this important book, I realize just how vitally important freedom of information truly is and how the lack of same is allowing the "select few" to "manage" the world without our consent, something very disturbing to say the least. To remain uninformed and passive no longer works as we move beyond the world of the 'aughts.

"Civilization in its present form hasn't got long." - James Lovelock

No Doubt Anymore

One of the most ancient and mysterious of creatures, the nautilus moves through the deep oceans with infinite patience and consummate slowness. Around for over 500 million years, this denizen of the deep, along with all other sea life, is now threatened by CO2, the gas produced in overabundance by man.

"Principal investigator Robert Byrne, a USF seawater physical chemistry professor, said the study leaves no doubt that growing CO2 levels in the atmosphere are exerting major impacts on the world’s oceans.

“If this happens in a piece of ocean as big as a whole ocean basin, then this is a global phenomenon,” Byrne said.

Adding carbon dioxide to seawater makes it more acidic, and each year the world’s oceans absorb about one-third of the atmospheric CO2 produced by human activities...

The results verify earlier model projections that the oceans are becoming more acidic because of the uptake of carbon dioxide released as a result of fossil fuel burning, said Richard Feely, a member of the research team and chief scientist of the cruise and NOAA researcher from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

The implications for sea life and the world’s food web are serious, Byrne said. When seawater becomes more acidic, lower concentrations of carbonate result. Because the protective shells of sea organisms are made of calcium and carbonate, more acidic waters make it more difficult for many organisms to make their shells and thrive. .

Over the next millennium, the global oceans are expected to absorb approximately 90 percent of the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere, says Christopher Sabine, chief scientist for the first leg of the cruise.

"It is now established from models that there is a strong possibility that dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean surface will double over its pre-industrial value by the middle of this century, with accompanying surface ocean pH decreases that are greater than those experienced during the transition from ice ages to warm ages," Sabine said. "The uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide by the ocean changes the chemistry of the oceans and can potentially have significant impacts on the biological systems in the upper oceans."

“Estimates of future atmospheric and oceanic CO2 concentrations, based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission scenarios and general circulation models, indicate that by the middle of this century atmospheric CO2 levels could reach more than 500 ppm, and near the end of the century they could be over 800 ppm. Current levels are near 390 ppm, and preindustrial levels were near 280 ppm," Feely said.

Corresponding models for the oceans indicate that surface water pH would drop approximately 0.4 pH units, and the carbonate ion concentration would decrease almost 50 percent by the end of the century. This surface ocean pH would be lower than it has been for more than 20 million years.

Byrne and many other scientists expect that even if substantial reductions are made in the pace at which humans produce carbon dioxide, ocean acidification will continue for hundreds of years to come. "

James Lovelock's' dire prediction looms.

3C & counting

Santa Monica Pier, California today contrasted with the project sea level rise with 3C warning. Composite Climate Central

Without action, the world's temperature will rise by 3C - 5.4 F by 2100. With luck, knowing how phase transitions are exponential and not linear, the heat index could be even higher.

Fifty major cities, mostly in Asia, and at least one large nation on every continent but Australia and Antarctica are at risk. Many small island nations are threatened with near total loss of their land.

The collection of images and videos produced by the non-profit Climate Central visualize future sea level rise if the world fails to meet emissions reduction targets. The images show what areas of the world can be saved and which could be lost, taking with them the heritage and history of these coastal communities.

Space Center Houston, present day

Space Center Houston, +1.5C

Space Center Houston, +3C

Santa Monica Pier, present day

Santa Monica Pier, +1.5C

Santa Monica Pier, +3C

The researchers applied different scenarios of warming to determine where communities are most vulnerable within the next 200 to 2,000 years.

“We’ve seen about a foot of sea level rise over the last century,” Strauss said. “Looking forward we’re talking about 10 feet rise in the best case scenario and 30 feet in the worst.” In a higher warming scenario of 4C, sea level could rise to cover land where 15% of the global population live.

Remember, Lovelock warned us, Exxon deceived us ... Houston, we have a problem.