LifeItself

This post has been precipitated by the following question Christoph Becker asked rhetorically in a comment to Part VI : " Is education in our situation still of any use or is it just depressing, unwanted or even dangerous? " Mike Haywood, of course, found this cartoon that illustrates so well the fundamental quandary of the Green New Deal: Economic growth we got accustomed to will stop, and with it the global Ponzi scheme, which is a synonym for the global economy, will crumble. My short answer to Christoph was that good education would always be necessary for a functioning democracy. We see great examples of this requirement in Denmark, Finland, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Germany, for example. Education is the necessary condition for a thriving democracy, but it alone is woefully insufficient.  Democracy must also be antifragile in the sense of Nassim Taleb . That is, any perturbation that attempts to blow up an antifragile democracy, will only make it stronger...

Amid an ongoing Arctic heat wave , the Greenland ice sheet is in the middle of its biggest melt season in recorded history. It’s the latest worrying signal climate change is accelerating far beyond the worst fears of even climate scientists. This is how the RollingStone put it, following an unspoken rule of never discouraging too much the clueless and faint at heart.  The reason is clear, we don't want 299 million Americans to freeze like deer in headlights, and exclaim: "Let's have an insanely rich farewell party before it all ends!". Free-floating ice floats jammed into the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019 near Ilulissat, Greenland. Ten billion ton of water melted in a single day. I am a geoscientist, and in my book this is an instantaneous positive feedback to global heating that must be very bad for humans. Image Source: Sean Gallup/Getty Images. My take on this 100-year ice melt on Greenland that just happened for the ...

The Arctic is burning across Alaska, Greenland and Siberia. The satellite image below shows smoke enveloping millions of square kilometers in Russia. You are witnessing a giant positive feedback to global warming. All hell is breaking loose, while most Americans are either asleep or in active denial. Four more years of Trump, and this hell will be decades closer to your bedrooms, my dear fellow Americans. Wildfires are burning across 11 regions of Russia amid a hot, dry summer. Even regions free from fire are feeling its effects, as air masses have spread the smoke plumes across a wide area. (Four million square kilometers as of July 28, 2019.) The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite acquired this natural-color image on July 21, 2019. Source: NASA Earth Observatory , accessed 28 July, 2019. Let me be clear.  The future is in solar energy, as in solar PV modules, passive solar heaters and wind turbines. The sun will last a lot longer t...

Recently, I gave in Polish an opening lecture, “Can we salvage our global civilization?”, at a one-day conference of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU). The conference took place in the Isabela Lanckoronska Auditorium at the historic PAU building on Slawkowska 17 Street in Kraków. This conference, “Civic organizations and local communities faced with climate change disasters,” was organized by the Committee on Threats to Civilization of PAU. The last lecture was given by a young activist from a well-known non-profit, who manifestly misled the audience with his proposed implementation of the Green New Deal that would immediately shut down all coal-fired electric power plants in Poland, and replace them with wind turbines, PV arrays and geothermal wells. I pointed out to the nice young man that his radical solution would cause immediate power blackouts in Poland, and asked if he shouldn't have mentioned some of the problems with the transition? His answer was that the or...