Winter Solstice and sustainable growth

Well, I can't really think of a connection between these two topics, except for the fact that both can only exist in moments of time, and soon will be passing us by.

I'm pretty much convinced in the argument that the success of our economic system is based on a continual growth of available cheap energy and if/when that growth of cheap energy ends, so will the basis of our success.

Whether our "party" will end imminently or in a century it seems clear to me that it won't be a happy ending unless we change course. It might even be that the is NO happy ending no matter what we do individually or collectively.

I've long thought at least that Conservation is a virtue because it minimizes wastefulness, but conservation isn't clearly a virtue in a "growth" economy. If we continue to grow and continue to squeeze out more and more efficiency along the way, when resources become scarce there little "fat" remaining in the system to be squeezed.

SO from he point of view of consumers and shortages and transitioning, the BEST choice is to WISELY "overconsume" now while things are cheap, but be prepared to cut WAY back later when prices rise.

A nice little theory of exploiting opportunity, but can it be done? Can we invest our "wealth" in a way that doesn't make us dependent upon it? Doesn't "Power corrupt"? Aren't we in continal danger of being corrupted by our own short term success and forget the bigger picture?

Yes is my answer to this rhetorical question. What's the use of building a massive infrastructure of civilization if we can't afford to keep it later?

Such questions are intractable in every way since the future is unknown and perhaps we will just keep leapfrogging to the next energy source greater than the last. Still until we've got our "Money in the bank", I think its worth questioning our priorities and decisions.

Recent thoughts work around cheap natural gas to heat our homes in Minnesota. Not that people will think the doubling of price in the last year is cheap, but given the convenience, cleanness and efficiency of natural gas, it seems like a pretty good deal to me still, even if I do keep my house a bit colder than I would if I was completely unaware of cost.

Cheap natural gas makes living in cold climates like Minnesota attractive. People move here, more houses are built that are heated by natural gas, and everyone is happy. UNTIL someday natural gas isn't as cheap and available as now, and then what do we do?

So the 100 year pattern (1950-2050) may be: (1) RISE: Short term opportunity and unsustainable growth (2) FALL: Shortages and abandonment.

I would say that further development is UNWISE until we "solve" our heating problems, until we can keep our homes warm without consuming every larger quanties of natural gas.

That may be a 50-year goal, and we might say "50 years is plenty of time to try something else", and we'd be DEAD wrong. Not that 50 years is NOT a long time, but that the problem NEVER gets any easier by waiting - it gets harder.

Why the HELL do people follow a pattern based purely on past success and current opportunity without projecting changing conditions in the future?!

Just like my belief we're best off with high gasoline taxes to make alternatives competitive for transportation, I'm SURE we're best off in the long run with higher natural gas prices NOW to make alternatives competitive for home heating.

WITHOUT high heating prices, people will continue building energy wasteful homes because it's not worth the higher short term costs to do things differently. Sure many newer homes are better insulated which is good, but they're still just big boxes totally dependent upon natural gas to stay warm.

There's innumerable problems in parallel of continued increased population and development and keeping warm is perhaps only in the top-10 list of deal-breakers for our future existence here.

I accept that change takes time and finding a GOOD new way LOTS of time, and best to try lots of new things in hopes a few will work out. But momentum in the wrong direction is a scary train to be on, and I have to believe we must do something to put on the brakes at the same time we're looking where to jump off!

I would have to say it is in the best interest of Minnesota to be "Energy self-sufficient" which means we ought to "produce" as much energy as we're consuming. Not a fair test for a state without fossil fuel resources in the ground to exploit. We WILL continue "importing" goal, natural gas, and oil for our energy needs as long as the markets exist to sell them at a price.

How do we "balance" this willful exploitation against being corrupted by it? What exists to counterbalance our consumption, to moderate it?

Clearly at some point in the future imported energy will lose its competititiveness and we will look BACK to our own resources for substitutes. Can such substitutes REPLACE even a fraction of our consumption now? (10% ethanol in gasoline at least) Can conservation help reduce our energy demands? Can we "retrofit" our economy under new conditions when inflation knocks it down?

In my little mind, I imagine somehow "good investment" and "bad investment" divisions can be made that help us see what increases the strength of our economy to withstand a global depression that will come with an energy shortage.

How will we keep our roads paved without cheap asphalt raw material, or cheap oil to run our machines to place it? What substitute material will we have, if not in 10 years, then in 100 years? Minnesota's climate is not friendly to any road paving with our long season of Freeze/thaw days and nights which work ice into the cracks. Without maintenance I would imagine our roadways would be a pot-holed nightmare within 10 years of neglect.

I would have to seriously think about abandoning many of our roads. Maybe such decisions don't need to be made now, but sooner or later the cost of road maintenance will force us to prioritize our needs. CERTAINLY it seems foolish to only envision the future of MORE ROADS without considering the cost and conditions of maintaining them.

I would think all roads deemed "primary", roads that had high daily usage, should have investment that resurfaces them with a more permanent material, from ceramic paver bricks to stone even. WHY not invest our "cheap energy" to get some roads that might still be around in 100 years?

And I've heard that rail is more efficient for long distance transportation than cross-country trucks. So it would seem we should invest in protecting our current rail system and expanding as needed to handle changes in population centers since they were first built.

It is hard to imagine being the place of government, now being forced to follow the business models of 5-10 year planning while government ought to be thinking of 50 year needs. It's hard to imagine all the demands for money from the government which DON'T support long term goals of viability our our collective future.

What fraction of income ought to be devoted to the future? Priorities are messy things, EVEN IF government people had a realistic perspective on what the future may hold.

Overall it seems crises alone are sufficient to pull people out of their blindspots.

Who am I to say we should "pave mainstreet with 100-year bricks" rather than "Add two more asphalt lanes to the suburban freeways"?

Who am I to say we should set 30mph as the "metro speed limit" to encourage fuel efficiency and lower power, lighter vehicles that don't take as much fuel begin with?

Who am I to say that the poorest 25% of the population ought to live well without cars entirely and that the city should be designed to meet their transit needs by walking, biking, and busing?

Who am I to say natural gas should be taxed at 50% rate to reduce consumption, subsidizing conservation and passive heating systems, and taxing construction that fails to follow best standards of energy reduction?

Living in a democracy means that if a majority of the people decide to jump off a cliff, we're all obligated to follow like the lemmings that we are.

Still I'm glad for my freedom to be foolish, and wouldn't easily accept paternalistic laws laid down from the benevolant dictator Greendude, anticipating "the needs of the 7th generation".

In the long run it's in all our best interest to change course, and whatever little corner each of us inhabits, we may all have are part to play to bring that about.

A million people can probably stop a train, if can see the cliffs coming. And it takes just one loud Chicken Little to offer the battle cry for action.

What are we waiting for?!

Investment opportunity?

A mystical feature of a economy of limited resources is appreciation.

Let's say neighborhood has 100 house and there's great demand to live there and the demand keeps going up. That is to say there seems to be no end in sight for rising value for that land.

What do you do if you're one of the owners? Perhaps the boom is just a fade and the bubble will burst, be you never know when, and you're already on top of the world, so what do you do?

If you can afford to hold on , you let it ride.

I tend to think of this appreciate in regards to ANWR oil in Alaska. We have a resource that is currently valued at some $60/bbl, and in some time in the future, within 0 to 30 years, it'll be worth A LOT MORE. It costs nothing to keep it in the ground a bit longer. Why rush it?

Of course we're an energy addict. If we sell it now, we may help keep the value of oil down a bit for a little longer, and then we've got nothing left. If we HOLD it, the price of oil will continue to go up and we'll continue spending more money on foreign oil, and go further into debt in the present, but at least we'll have our secret stash up there buried when we need it.

On the other hand, if you're an optimist, you know the cold-fussion hydrogen economy is just around the corner and it'll make messy dirty oil obsolete, or at least decrease its value for fuel into just a raw material for plastics and roads and such. Perhaps if the optimistist hit their stride, we may be at "peak price" now, and we ought to sell before it becomes less valuable.

Well, maybe they are right demand will go down, but we've not really got much anyway, so why not save the last bit for our plastics and such, even if we don't ever need it for a fuel source?

On the other side of the world, what strange force compels oil exporters to continue pumping out oil as fast as they can? Why don't they also wait for appreciate?

The whole system is corrupted in my opinion, corrupted by expectations that past success mean we don't need to worry about the future.

The reality for the U.S. is that we need to use LESS oil sooner or later, and drilling the last oil of ANWR doesn't really help us face that question. Buying more expensive oil from Saudi Arabia doesn't help either. And all successful efforts to conserve will just depress the demand, reduce the prices and encourage new buyers.

Well, I don't really believe in hoarding, but I like rainy day investments. I suppose I might just drain the Gulf of Mexico of Oil because it's "Damn hard" and I like my rainy day investments to be a little more accessible. Not that ANWR is much nicer, but at least there's no hurricanes and you get some good sunny days a few weeks of the year.

It is curious to imagine what Saudi Arabia might do if the U.S found a way to increase our Strategic reserve by a factor of 10 and started buying all the surplus we could find. It would obviously raise prices, which they'd like, but sellers must start getting worried if buyers are too enthusiastic about buying something they're just storing away for a rainy day. They might actually get a clue and decide to NOT expand their production to meet the market.

I'm not at all invested in the energy industry, not nowhere, except perhaps my tax dollars paying for Democracy for Iraq.

Just sort of curious. $500B for freedom for 20 million people of Iraq. That's $25,000/person. I hope they're really grateful for us bombing them and stuff.

Just out of curiousity, how much oil can you buy for that? Looks like about 8 billion barrels of oil, about the value of the oil in ANWR if you're an optimist. About the amount of oil the U.S. consumes in about a year. Well, maybe also the cost of sending a dozen of astronauts to Mars to take some pictures and grab some rocks.

The cost of War is truly astronomical. And soon will be our energy prices...

Glacial cycles and the future of humanity

I've continued to be curious about the nature of the CO2 graphs I uploaded last week. Regular oscillations imply driving mechanisms and negative feedbacks.

There's a useful comparison of the energy system that defines the motion of a pendulum. A pendulum "works" conceptually by energy transfer between a Kinetic form (motion) and Potential form (gravity). If you grab a pendulum at the bottom, you must take away it's kinetic energy and this energy is lost. If you grab a pendulum at the top, the motion was minimal and energy is "stored" in the gravitational field itself and the pendulum can be restarted simply by letting it go again.

This sort of oscillation is called Simple Harmonic Motion (at least for low angle pendulums) and is represented by a second order differential equation. The solution of this equation becomes a sine graph for motion, a cosine graph for velocity, a negative sine graph for acceleration, and so on.

There is a theory, called Milankovitch cycles, that the Earth's orbital motion around the sun and rotational axis, with variations in eccentricity, obliquity being driving forces in the glacial cycles, just like the annual cycle around the sun controls the seasons on earth.

In compliment perhaps there's another theory called The Gaia Hypothesis which looks at the effects of life itself as a driving force for the conditions on earth. Whether considered driven by mystical ideas of "Life consciousness" or more of a "Natural selection", the idea basically says that living systems on earth moderate the conditions that best support their survival.

The simplest idea of life acting (unconsciously) as a moderation system was described in a model called Daisy World where there were two types of flowers, white and black. White flowers thrived in warm temperatures, and black flowers thrived in cool temperatures. If you imagine "moderate temperatures" and an equal amounts of each flower, as an initial equilibrium, and then you try "driving" the system by forced cooling. This cooling would give a competitive advantage to the black flowers, and they would increase in numbers. As they increased, they'd absorb more solar energy and radiate that energy back into the environment as infrared heat, and warm the environment. In contrast, if you warmed the environment, the white flowers would tend to dominate, and reflect more visible light energy back into space, helping to cool the extra heat. So this simple system could tend towards an equilibrium at different temperatures based on external driving forces.

IN CONTRAST, but like Daisy world, snow and ice offer a higher reflectivity of the planet. Unfortunately it is in the opposite effect. Snow thrives under cold conditions it reflects more light back into space, which cools the world and encourages more snow to accumulate over more land and cool things more. In the opposite direction, melting glaciers uncover more darker ground which absorbs more light and warms the temperature which can melt more ice.

Oscillating systems are interesting for spending the majority of their time in the extremes and relatively quick transition periods.

The most recent glaciation, named the Wisconsin in North America, began 70,000 years ago, reached a peak about 18,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. You can see the in the G1 part of the graph, a long continuous "fall" in CO2, and a sudden reversal.

If you were living 18,000 years ago, measuring the glacial ice advance and falling CO2, you'd perhaps think the world was falling into a permanent freeze of no return. Of course you'd be wrong, maybe just like a pessimistic Groundhog might be wrong on a cold mid-winter's day thinking the world was just getting colder. The "driving forces" are not visible in the cold-facts of CO2 levels, although they might be visible in careful measurements of averaged rates of change of CO2. A sine wave slows as it reaches its peak. Still, if you look at the graph in the last posting, there's no clear sign of slowing.

In COMPARISON perhaps, in our current CO2 increases, there's a strong and accelerating upward trend. Most likely MOST of this increase is due to Human actions on the environment - between agriculture, deforestation and burning of fossil fuels.


A 50 year trend is impressively consistent, and by limited prehistoric data is certainly unprecedented in BOTH the rate of change and the absolute levels of CO2.

Even more impressive is to compare to the 5000 year history:


What's harder to determine is "what it means". This period is considered "Human history" including the oldest written records. It makes sense that the increase since about 1850 correspond to our "fossil fuel era". It certainly also corresponds to the increase of human population. Human population has increased from slightly over a billion people around 1850 to close to 7 billion people now, and the "fossil fuel era" has also increases the power and resources available to people.

Most of all I suppose such historical data shows that we're in a special time in history and that there's multiple possible futures, AND they EXCLUDE the possibility of continued exponential growth. Something has "got to give", and the possibility of supporting more than a billion people in 100 years may be the option we have to give up. Scary stuff, and there's plenty of websites supporting such fears, like http://dieoff.org . My strongest argument is that our "energy resources" are the limiting factors of our way of life and we'll either find more sustainable ways to support us OR we won't be supported in the future.

A conservative rational perspective would seem to always promote moderation. If we're going to "live beyond our means", at least let's do it with moderation. Rather than holding drinking parties EVERY night, perhaps we'll just hold them once a week, right? Or perhaps we'll give up beer, and just drink a little glass of wine on special occassions?

It's hard to imagine "moderation" on the fossil fuel consumption. If our current "binge" is consuming fossil fuels at a rate of a million times faster than they are being created, are we better off cutting our consumption by a factor of 10? Well, probably we are since we have a "large stash" of it, and then we have 10 times longer to make use of it.

On the other hand, unfortunately humanity appears to be heading in the opposite direction, continued increase in population, continued increase in "per capita" consumption, and a worldwide 5 billion person underclass waiting to catch up to the highest consumption centers like the U.S.

An optimist would say that perhaps the "Meteoritic" approach to life is the way to go - give it all you got and go in style if things don't work out. Perhaps "Necessity is the mother of invention" and the "Necessity of feeding 9 billion people without petroleum" is the incentive we need to prioritize our needs and focus our energy on alternatives.

I'm not against fairy tales, and I can accept that our current delimma, although intractable in itself, might be offset by "something new" (like controllable nuclear fussion) which will make our current problems obsolete. Not that the dilemma of environmental distruction will end if we find a new superior source of energy, but SOME of the coming failures in the next 30 years can be delayed at least.

Still I'm forced by my temperament to be a stick in the mud and admit "we really don't know what we're doing", and "people will suffer and die unnecessarily" because of it. If I were religious I'd point out that "God knows" and things'll be better as soon as we all are forced to admit our weaknesses to build "Heaven on earth" by our own good management.

Since I'm not looking for God to come down and save us (or punish us), I'm left to accept the high probability that this current "Energy bubble" will burst sooner or later and we'll all "make do" when it happens and discover a new set of rules to govern the world. I do fear this may lead to a devaluing of "democratic" principles, and a new "survival of the fittest", which means the ambitious will fight it out for dominion and "peace" happens when a clearly strongest dictator stands on top. The rest of us can make do with the scraps that fall from below, and put up with injustice as we must.

It would be fun to see into the future and see which trends continue, and which trends reverse. Although I guess if I knew too much I'd probably be even more depressed. Uncertainy of doom allows some hope, while guarantees aren't easily helpful.

Sadly, knowing unsustainable trends, I'll vote for "taking my medicine" earlier than later, so I hope for an early sickness that demands attention. On the other hand, I'll keep playing the game as I can, pay down my mortgage for now, and invest here and there as I can in slightly less insane things.

The biggest "working issue" for me may be transportation. With oil as perhaps the "first energy crisis" coming, and transportation 90% dependent upon oil, it would seem cars are the first thing that'll get stretched in the coming decade.

I rather like that I've gone now over 10 months without a car, merely sharing expenses with my girlfriend's minivan, which I hate to drive and can go months without driving, at least under nicer weather.

I can't imagine how our modern sprawl cities can function with out cars. In a week I'll ride-share with a coworker to a Saturday Christmas party. On the day after Christmas, I'll likely borrow the minivan and drive my niece and sister to an extended family gathering at Old Country Buffet. I'm still working out how I'll attend my bimonthly Toastmaster club meetings, but at least next week looks like bicyclable weather, even with chances for light snow messing up the roads.

I'm in a very mellow stage of my life with needs for transportation. I've no children to drive around, no dating requirements, and really not doing much hanging out with distant friends. There were times when I had weekly outings with friends and we'd drive to a bowling alley, drive to a restaurent, often tens of miles combined and multitudes of cars between us. A nice freedom, automobile's provide, and who would give that up? It just seems a little silly in the back of my mine to select friendship circles across a wide city and neglect equally nice people closer to home. A long old guilt, one I'm not overly controlled by, and one I'm unlikely to give up as long as email and phones exist.

Anyway, whatever the solutions, it seems clear to me that the future of transportation by personal automobile will be more limiting the future and those on the bottom will be those who will first most be effected and have to react. Partly I accept improved mass-transit is part of the solution, but not a quick one, nor at all a replacement, except for people who happen to live, or choose to live in the highest density locations of the city.

It is fun to imagine starting a "No car club" or something equally idealistic, but I'm not fully sure I'm committed to it, except on altruistic grounds. I DEFINITELY like not having a car means I'm not obligated to drive others around who can't drive. Definitely the top reason for not having a car. Still if I wanted to re-enter a "social stage" where I had lots of varied activities, I have a hard time imaging wanting to play that game without a car. The reality in my whole life is in fact having a car for "pleasure", for socializing, for dating, for vacations. Practical uses like commuting I've been able to avoid, and "shopping uses" definitely don't justify a daily access to a car for myself.

Enough lost thoughts. I'll just leave smiling with the Saudi Arabian saying "My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies a jet plane. His son will ride a camel."

I'll add a wonderment at the changes of the last century, and also the tragedies. It seems we've been overall lucky for good weather for a couple decades and we can't continue hoping the luck will continue without some more rainy days, some more cold winters, some more droughts, some more times of economic fear and downturn.

Whatever else is true, I'm SURE the minimum goodness for the moment is to get out of debt and conserve some resources for the coming winter.

1 Million year global temperature variations with fossil record

I found a paper that reconstructs temperate variation back over 5 million years using corings from seafloor sedimentation layers and measures variations in O18 isotope. (Specifically this paper offers aligned averages of a 57 corings from different locations.)

Source data:
http://www.lorraine-lisiecki.com/stack.html LR04 Benthic Stack
http://www.lorraine-lisiecki.com/LR04stack_corrected2.txt

This is a graph (below) only goes back 1 million years to compare (and slightly extend the ice core graph following further down.)

I gave up trying to label the highs and lows with named glacial periods. Instead I counted back Interglacials with I1,I2... and Glacials with G1,G2,...

Comparing to the CO2 graph demonstrates to a strong connection between the two, even if not perfectly related in variations. So (G7), the "Nebraskian glacial period" was the oldest BIG glacial cycle around 620,000-680,000 years ago.

Atmospheric CO2 and glacial cycles to 650,000 BP

Atmospheric CO2 from 650,000 BP !!!

Source data:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/domec/domec_epica_data.html

• Siegenthaler et al. 2005 CO2 Data for 650 - 390 KYrBP in text or Microsoft Excel format. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2-650k-390k.xls

This is the Atmospheric CO2 data I've been looking for, appending the previous ice core data from 420,000 BP to 650,000 BP.

NEWS article without graphics: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00020983-B238-1384-B23883414B7F0000 Ice Core Extends Climate Record Back 650,000 Years

It shows similar 5 intergacial peaks, approximately every 100,000 years, and two more mellow peaks before 500,000 years ago.

On the FAR RIGHT you see our latest interglacial period PLUS humanity's CO2 jump in the last some 100+ years. In this scale the "modern" record is VERTICAL.

What will the next 100 years bring? I don't think anyone is prepared for that.

Atmospheric CO2

I'm still looking for DATA on the new CO2 measures back 650,000 in ice cores in Dome C in Antarctica.

Articles are nice, but graphics is BETTER:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00020983-B238-1384-B23883414B7F0000 Ice Core Extends Climate Record Back 650,000 Years

While I wait, I thought I'd upload some graphs I made for a 2003 speech on CO2.

1. Recent CO2: 1958-2001 (Measured from Mauna Loa, Hawaii)

Here you can see seasonal varitions from monthly measurements on a steady track upwards i the last 50 years.


2. Historical levels: 3000BC to present:

Here you can see lower resolution data over the last 5000 years, showing CO2 to be fairly constant before 1900, and an EXTREMELY short upswing since. (Coinciding with our vastly increased burning of fossil fuels!)

You can't necessarily say how smooth the data is over 5000 years since we don't have a lot of data points, but clearly "something's happening" recently that is new.

3. 418,000 BP to present:

Here you can see the "recent" climb from 280 to 380 ppm is added ON TOP of a previous quick rise from 15000 BC to 8000BC (180-270ppm), a 50% rise, but that took 7000 years!

Looking further back you can see four more distant "peaks" corresponding to "pre-industrial levels around 280ppm. Each of these "peaks" is a "short" ~5000-20,000 year warm interglacial period with the majority of CO2 levels much lower between the peaks, corrsponding to glacial periods where the earth was colder.

In fact evidence suggests the last 1.6 million years (of our species' evolution) has been mostly a cold glacial period with short warm interglacial periods.

4. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years PAUL N. PEARSON AND MARTIN R. PALMER [Nature 406, 695 - 699 (August 17, 2002)] (0-25Mya, 40-60Mya)

This graph shows data back much further, to 23 million years ago and with the limited data points, atmospheric CO2 has been between 145-305 ppm over the last 22 million years. Although just a bit further back we hit ONE data point around 440ppm (higher than our 380ppm now)

Given the earth is 4.3 billion years old, this data is still barely 5% of the earth's history and not even "half-way" back to the dinosaurs extinction!

Not much can be said (by me about this data), except that at least by the measure of CO2 over 100 years Humanity has causes large changes much faster than geological processes cause.

I'm reluctant to get into the "global warming" debate, not because I don't believe it, just prefer to be cautious and not overstate the evidence, at least for CO2.

The thing is we know without humanity, there is a pretty clear correlation between global temperature averages and atmospheric CO2 levels. However we don't have any prehistorical data of the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuels in a short period of time.

Some anti-global warming opinions like to state that human sources of Atmospheric CO2 are only a small fraction of nonhuman sources. I can discount this argument because the "natural carbon cycle" works as a semiclosed cycle on an annual basis - plants take in CO2 when they grow and release it (via microbial decay) when they decompose. The CO2 we're creating is coming from plant matter that DID not decay in an Oxygen environment millions of years ago. So we're adding prehistoric carbon to the atmosphere (and oceans), and we don't know how well the carbon cycle will readjust to our additions. Well, ALSO, some of the CO2 rise is NOT be due to fossil fuel burning, but deforestation, like the rain forests.

So if we STOP burning fossil fuels, and wait 1000 years, it COULD be natural systems will take up the extra CO2 in a net increased living plant matter. On the other hand, CO2 levels might keep rising much longer even without new input from us, just a result of our deforestation. Then again, perhaps a negative feedback mechanism (like increased clouds) might cool the earth despite the higher CO2 and we might fall back towards a glacial period. In short, I don't think we have a clue what can happen whatever we do.

When I first saw the Mauna Loa CO2 graphics from 1958, I thought it was a clear sign of humanity's effect on the environment, and I believe that still, BUT I just can't convince myself we know much how the system will respond to our fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

Incidentally, I read "today" (December 3) is The Climate Crisis Coalition Action Day (To coincide with the UN Climate talks in Montreal, November 28th-December 9th )
http://www.climatecrisiscoalition.org/
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/571

Climate Crisis might be a better term than global warming, but both seem less that clear to me.

There's a demonstration Saturday at noon at the Governor's mansion in St Paul. I considered going, but lots else to do, and I'm not focused well enough to think it'll make a difference to me.

I like the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and with the U.S. would support it. I think it's in our best interest in every way (except short term convenience) to move every which way we can if it is away from burning fossil fuels. I'm fully skeptical that capitalism and market mechanisms and "voluntary action" is sufficient to even halt our ever increased energy consumption, much less reverse it. Only shortages of cheap energy seem believable mechanisms. So either natural shortages will occur OR the government can create artificial shortages via limiting imports of petroleum, NLG. Okay, I'd listen to "Carbon taxes" as well, but that's just an accounting method of creation artificial shortages.

Well, it'll be interesting to see more CO2 graphs before 440,000 BP.

Best I've seen (for graphics) is at:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/epica2004/epica2004.html

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/epica2004/epica2004.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/domec/domec_epica_data.html

Not CO2 data though...

... AH NEW DATA?
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2-650k-390k.txt
... hold it a moment!!!

Take a Breath, Change a World

May you live in interesting times. I think we've satisified that requirement for the last century. Will it last?

Who can say? Not me, but if you're a wagering person, and you'd like to make a 50 year bet, I've got my money on a completely different world in 50 years. 2055? Not that far away really. Halley's comet won't be back until 2061, and it's passed the earth dozens of times.

I think any period will have its interesting points, and if trying to stay alive is interesting, well, be prepared for interesting times!

I look forward to better seeing the hard choices that will have to be made in the next decade AND the change of expectations and consciousness. It'll be interesting to be sure, even if not very much fun.

It may yet just be an issue of domination that will control the world in 50 years, but I tend to think in the opposite direction - that those who try the dominion model are those with the most to lose and power will more likely than not slip between their fingertips whatever they do or want to do.

Of course I'm part of the Dominion Model, under the power of Growth Capitalism. Capitalism has served us well, and Democracy itself is uplifted by the Growth model. Unforunately Capitalism must change into a Decline model of reduced energy availability and I expect it'll become something different.

Well, I guess wars have been around quite a long time. In the past humans just supplied more of the energy in running them. I don't see us quickly going back to the wars of the English Empire where stategic events moved in months based on the speed of communication. Still, I expect war will slow down and localize more.

Mainly I'm just thinking, if you happened to be a part of a "resistance movement", Gandhi's approach would seem to gain power. It's a little tough to take, but ultimately I think direct resistance by violence must be less valuable in the future, even "terrorism" seems a little too impatient of an approach. It's true in regards to direct assault to the environment, I might get a little destructive in a response, but overall I prefer the "Witness" and "Document" model of resistance.

Well mostly I write "Take a breath" to mean things WILL change with or without our direct effort, so it's better to direct our attention to reacting and predicting as we can, to muddle into the future. It's a waste of effort to spend too much energy in direct fighting. Maybe I'm wrong, and a good fight of the underdogs against a superior force is always exciting. Maybe I just don't have the heart for it.

The political fight is more worthy, but perhaps equally frustrating and futile. To try to bridge the communication gap between people who believe in Biblical prophesy and the "Left behind" mythology, it seems too vast to hope for mutual respect and understanding. I'd best best hope to "classify" opponents, expose as I can, but otherwise let go. It's not like Unlimited Growth Capitalism isn't any LESS mythical and I'm still deceived by that dream.

So Take a Breath, and the world will change. Our time in history is coming to an end. The future will belong to those who best adapt to the changed world. Maybe looking all down is just as wrong as looking just up, but we shall see.